Do unto others...

Over the years and around the world I've worked with many of the major pharmaceutical companies but for whatever reason I haven't often crossed paths with Pfizer.  As such my impressions of the world's largest pharma company has usually been that of their competitors.

For over twenty years Pfizer has been the most ruthlessly single-minded marketing outfit in the industry.  By flooding doctors' offices with legions of undertrained reps, often as many as eight per territory for a single product, it sold good drugs (Lipitor, Viagra) in a bad way.  This successful focus on 'share of voice' triggered an arms race wherein every company selling a product in Primary Care had to proliferate sales reps or else be elbowed out of the doctor's mind.  This deluge of drug reps selling poorly differentiated products by parroting two or three key messages with scant regard for a prescriber's clinical needs has destroyed the industry's claim to be a partner in the fight against disease.  Most doctors now see the industry not as a partner but as an enemy and Pfizer's 'share of voice' strategy is a major cause of this shift.

As I said, I've not done much work for Pfizer but I've often been brought in to help prepare a defensive response to an upcoming Pfizer launch into a given market.  Even in specialty care fields like oncology there's a perception that Pfizer will enter the fray with a massive sales/marketing investment dispatched with a discipline that feels like violence.  All of those barroom laments at sales conferences about the underhanded things done by 'the other guy' are usually about the Pfizer rep.

This ruthlessness goes way beyond the hurly-burly of a couple of reps scrambling after a prescription in a suburban clinic somewhere in America.  Pfizer has effectively declared war on the government of New Zealand by demanding that Pharmac, the highly effective regulatory body charged with controlling the country's drug costs, be neutered in the name of an impending Free Trade Agreement.  Admittedly Pfizer isn't acting alone here and so far the NZ government has stood its ground but this story has a way to run yet.

You could argue that Pfizer really isn't any different from any of the other players (i.e. my clients); just a little more focused on the bottom line and a little more eager to adopt practices that will hurt the entire industry in the long term.

I disagree.  Lipitor, the largest selling drug of all time, is now off patent and in pursuit of this bottom line Pfizer is devouring the very people who drove that success.  I can just about stomach the job cuts because we could all see those coming; although this is cold comfort to the 16,300 employees losing their jobs in the coming weeks.  What I wasn't aware of was Pfizer's longer-term move to cap (American) retiree health benefits at $11,700 p.a. despite the cost of the policy being over $22,000 and rising.  The ex-employee pays the rest.  According to the Placebo Effect blog this will save the company about $534 million a year.  When Pfizer's sucked you dry it really does just discard the husk and move on.

The only justifiable stance the pharma industry has ever been able to take was set out by George Merck in 1950: -

We try never to forget that medicine is for the people.  It is not for the profits.  The profits follow, and if we have remembered that, they have never failed to appear.  The better we have remembered it, the larger they have been. 

In pursuit of profits Pfizer has thrown so much under the bus; the one-to-one relationship with the doctor, the collegiate nature of the industry, its world class research centres in Kent and Michigan and its own employees, past and present.  Its decline from industry dominance is not to be lamented.