For many years, the pharma and biotech industries drew clear distinctions. Pharmaceutical manufacturers made small-molecule therapies synthesized in the lab. Biotechs, on the other hand, use living cells or tissues to produce their therapies.
In the pursuit of these different business models, pharma companies were often seen as large, slow-moving enterprises with large, blockbuster-oriented product portfolios, while biotechs were regarded as smaller, more agile, R&D-focused organizations with only a handful of products.
Over time, this distinction has blurred significantly, especially as the biotech industry has emerged as a powerful economic force. By some estimates, the global biotech market is expected to exceed 6.34 trillion dollars by 2035. It was inevitable that traditional small-molecule pharma companies would start to venture into territories once owned by the biotechs, either through R&D or M&A. This has led to the emergence of an entirely new field commonly referred to as biopharma (a term that is confusing in its own right, sometimes referring to the type of company, other times referring to the type of medicine).
Still, it’s informative to think of pharma and biotech as clearly distinct industries with different rules, expectations, and regulations. This applies to marketing and advertising strategy as much as it applies to company size, risk tolerance, and approach to R&D. In this blog, we offer a detailed examination of the unique strategies required for pharma versus biotech marketing, exploring how these fields differ in their target demographics, core messaging, content development, and more.
Pharma vs. Biotech Marketing: Understanding the Key Differences
Target Audience
To understand why marketing pharmaceutical products differs from biotech products, it’s best to start by analyzing each industry’s distinct target audience, as this informs their respective messaging and content strategies. Due to differences in manufacturing complexity, distribution, and cost, pharma and biotech face different hurdles to market adoption. These factors dictate a customer’s ability to access each industry’s products and services and influence the marketing strategies employed by pharma and biotech companies.
Pharma
Pharmaceutical companies have historically marketed small-molecule drugs to two primary audiences: the general public, who suffer from pervasive chronic conditions (for example, diabetes and cardiovascular disease), and a broad base of healthcare professionals (HCPs) who write prescriptions. Ever since 1997, when the FDA allowed broadcast advertisements to satisfy the fair balance requirement by including far simpler side effect profiles called “major statements,” the industry has relied heavily on direct-to-consumer advertising (or DTCA) to promote its products to the general public. To reach prescribing physicians, pharma companies enlist an army of sales representatives to promote directly to physicians. These interactions are highly regulated, but the primary function of sales specialists is to educate HCPs about medications and, ultimately, to influence their prescribing patterns.
Biotech
Biotech marketing is driven by the kind of therapy coming out of biotech pipelines. Biologics — medicines derived from cells and living tissues — are typically administered by infusion or injection and often in clinical settings. These kinds of medicines are often expensive, require specialty pharmacies for distribution, and often have smaller patient populations. As a result, mass-market advertising is not always practical or effective. Instead, biotech marketing more commonly targets the specialists who diagnose and treat the related disease states, key opinion leaders (KOLs), and payers. Biotech marketers commonly deploy Medical Science Liaisons (MSLs), professionals holding advanced scientific degrees, who can engage in peer-to-peer dialogue with these stakeholders. This makes biotech marketing more B2B-centric and less concerned with advertising to broad patient demographics (although direct-to-consumer advertising of biologics is becoming more common, as commercials for Dupixent, Skyrizi, and VYVGART Hytrulo indicate).
Sometimes, a biotech company focuses on patient advocacy groups for orphan or rare diseases that are highly organized and have an existing infrastructure in place that’s prepared to engage with biotech’s strict regulations and unique hurdles. They also regard investors as a key audience because they often need venture capital funding to get their operations off the ground. This is particularly true for start-up biotechs, which often court the investment community via pitch decks and other targeted communications.
Messaging
A brand messaging framework is much more than a tagline or bulleted copy points; it’s the organizing structure that communicates the unique value of your brand or product to your target audience. Given that pharmaceutical companies produce small-molecule drugs that target an entirely separate demographic from biotech, it makes sense that their core messaging would follow different strategic frameworks.
Pharma
Because pharma markets directly to consumers, the messaging is pathos-centric, or focused on feelings, emotions, or empathy. It has broad appeal and focuses on cost-effectiveness and lifestyle benefits. This audience is not as well-versed in the industry’s complex terminology, so marketers must rely on comparisons to existing medications or emphasize an increase in the customer’s quality of life, like ease of administration. For example, they might highlight that their product can be taken orally and only once a day, but are less likely to explore the complex data behind that drug’s development. If pharma messaging is directed towards HCPs, it focuses less on lifestyle benefits and more on hard data, like efficacy rates and clinical trial results.
Biotech
Because biotechs target specialists, their messaging relies on an ethos-centric framework — highly technical and data-driven. That being said, although biotech’s target audience is far more technical than your everyday consumer, they are learning about rare diseases they may not encounter often, all with competing new therapies, and still appreciate it when marketers translate incredibly intricate, cutting-edge research into digestible and visually appealing content. Just because these buyers understand raw data doesn’t mean they want to wade through a mind-numbing stream of information. Yes, the data is invaluable to this demographic, but visual presentation and impactful, consistent messaging remain crucial.
Content Strategy and Channels
Given the differences between the audiences and regulatory landscapes of pharma and biotech, the marketing channels and content strategies that yield the highest return on investment vary drastically by industry. As the industries continue to converge, however, the evolution from single channel to multichannel to omnichannel marketing will be inevitable. The transition to omnichannel engagement represents a strategic shift designed to provide an integrated, personalized experience across all touchpoints, with the needs of the audience driving marketing strategy.
Pharma
Unlike biotech, pharma relies on mass-appeal marketing that uses more traditional advertising to garner interest from everyday consumers. This often takes the form of patient testimonials, television ads, social media posts, and video campaigns, all carefully orchestrated and aligned around theme, color, and music. These interacting brand elements can be seen in increasingly cinematic pharma commercials on TV promoting new, groundbreaking medications. They often feature shots of a recovering patient as their testimonial plays in the background, almost always followed by a rapid flurry of words outlining all the potential side effects. Pharma strategy depends heavily on the “mere exposure effect,” hoping that consistent appearances and repeated exposures in the feeds of their consumers will, in time, yield a preference for their product.
Biotech
Although it’s becoming more common, biotech products and services are not typically advertised on conventional TV networks. Given the inherently specialized nature of biotech products or services, marketing teams commonly work with MSLs to understand the scientific landscape and how best to address audience needs and challenges. Using insights provided by MSLs, biotech marketers often depend on channels like whitepapers, research articles, medical journals, conferences, and research presentations that are more effective in delivering data-heavy clinical content.
As mentioned above, recent data suggests that a larger share of pharma and biotech marketers are relying on an omnichannel approach. According to the Alexander Group Biotech and Pharmaceutical Commercial Study, 42 percent of modern commercial models combine the classic multichannel strategy (using sales representatives and managers to engage with prescribers) in tandem with less conventional, patient-centric and payer-centric strategies (models focused on educating patients and building meaningful, long-lasting relationships with payers). Over the next three to five years, this omnichannel model will become more prevalent in both the pharma and biotech industries.
Key Takeaways
Although these two segments of the life science industry will continue to overlap, their respective target audiences, messaging frameworks, and content strategies will maintain some subtle differences. That’s why it’s important to understand each industry’s marketing strategy and how to best employ it. Yes, previously pharma-exclusive companies are going to offer more biotech products and services, but in doing so, they will need to accommodate biotech’s manufacturing complexity, regulations, and price point. And as small biotechs grow into larger, more pharma-like organizations, they will need to widen their marketing lenses — and budgets — to attract a more diverse set of stakeholders. Both segments will accelerate their omnichannel strategies to break down siloes and create unified experiences for patients, HCPs, payers, and medical specialists.
To learn more about how Cobalt helps pharma and biotech manufacturers and other science-focused B2B businesses with their marketing and messaging strategy, visit the Cobalt services page or contact the Cobalt team.
