Intelligence – The Responsibility of Clinical Marketing

admin — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 01:18:29 +0000

As with our life sciences industry, any industry that relies on technology to diagnose, mitigate or solve a problem, needs to take a strategic view of how that technology is applied and managed.

Applying the technology to the problem is typically the job of senior applications and design engineers. Extending its application to making it manufacturable is the responsibility of the senior manufacturing engineers.

But managing the technology can be assigned to any number of functional managers from engineering to marketing to business development to senior management.

No matter who assumes the role, your management team needs to be well-informed with intelligence. And not just commercial or industry intelligence but technology application intelligence. In our life sciences industry, this technology as applied to the problem is considered a clinical or medical application.

So whose responsibility is it to track clinical competitive intelligence to make strategic business decisions? Clinical research? Marketing communications? Business development? Competitive intelligence? Let’s propose a hybrid between clinical research and marketing to create “Clinical Marketing.”

Clinical marketing does not manage the daily marketing communications, marketing messaging or sales support roles. Clinical marketing (CM) guides the clinical research team and reports to senior management, closely tracking competitor activity, clinical research results, new physician practice patterns, off label uses, and more to understand the market and strategically layout the course organization will follow. CM also keeps a close eye on clinical research results, medical findings and technology developments to interpret and broadcast their potential impact to prevent your company from being caught by surprise enabling it to surpass the competition.

Assign a new function, that of clinical marketing to keep your management team alert, knowledgeable and insightful, giving your company the market advantage.

Stay alert, be intelligent -

Victoria Hunsicker Sanko

Senior Editor

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Intelligence – The Responsibility of Clinical Marketing