Pharmaceutical PR Industry

Yesterday my view about pharmaceutical Industry changed. As a PR student, I always thought that pharmaceutical Industry was not for me. One main reason for this was that I don’t know anything beyond paracetamol in medicine and then the industry has a bad name. But I was wrong.

Many students do not think of pharmaceutical companies, but we should definitely look at this industry.  In today’s world every newspaper, magazine has an article on health. Why? Since nothing is more important and interesting than our health.

This leads me to the seminar I attended today regarding the pharmaceutical industry, given by Claire Eldridge (MD of Aurora communications) and Robert Cohen (European Communications Director of Mundipharma)

Right in the beginning of the seminar Robert Cohen says “Pharmaceutical PR is the Purest form of PR,” YA RIGHT I said to myself, but then he gave some interesting facts like only in the pharmaceutical industry you cannot advertise your drugs to the consumers and to the doctors.

Then every drug when it gets licensed passes through a vigorous process. Only after 10-12 years of R&D, a drug makes it presence in the market and then only 3 out of 10 make it through the competition. $1 Billion is spent on R&D on each product. Another point made by Robert was  “for each and every ‘buying’ decision you have to convince a multitude of disparate stakeholders, each with a very different perspective and need.  The messages are complex and in some cases you don’t have the luxury of being able to use other more direct forms of communication. Major Pharmaceutical brands are only built on the back of sound PR.”  To work with odds like that, the pharmaceutical PR is indeed the purest form of PR.

Well for my fellow students, the Pharmaceutical industry is growing, and you could be a part of an industry where you will never have any boring days, you will save many lives, travel a lot. There are group discussions you will attend, where you educate the public about medicine, make some difference in people’s lives who are ill, yes all this being in the PR pharmaceutical industry.

You do not need to have any medicine background or scientific background for this industry. As Claire said, the industry likes to pair up people with communication and medical educational background because the mixture of them can only produce a great PR for the client.

Check out www.breakthroughlive.com, where a list of many pharmaceutical companies is given. The website is based for students.

The Seroxat Issue

Of course at the end of the seminar, I asked about Seroxat, implying that the one other reason I don’t want to enter this industry is because it is quite unethical where the information is hidden from the publics, and many die because of research data not being disclosed to the public.

I was happy to see that both Claire and Robert did not try to escape the question by saying that they had nothing to do with it, rather their answer was framed in such a way that owned up to the actions of the whole industry even if their companies and they themselves weren’t involved . “It would be wrong of any organisation not to disclose data that has serious public health implications,” Robert said.  And Claire further saying that there are things which “she will not do” for the industry in regards to ethical issues.

It made me think that we are the new generation of PR, and if we are ethical, we can change people’s view that PR professionals lie quite a bit. Yes of course mistakes have been made in the past, but these practitioners showed that they care about the public and they are not just in it for the money. Furthermore, they didn’t evade the question, rather gave a transparent view of the issue. It showed that PR practioners are becoming very ethical and professional beyond many other chartered professionals. You can read further my views on ethical PR issues in my pervious blog.