Day 4 –Branding and Business Research

Sounds more like a sales & marketing day. But in actual fact, when big pharma companies market their brands, they are also helping the society at large. It’s not like attracting consumers’ attention to buy something that’s surely bad for your health (if you know what I mean). You’ll get my point later when I explain. Anyway, let’s start with the morning session.

The Consumer Brand department head gave us a talk on what it’s all about. Basically their job is to organize corporate events, like coming to our university and give talks in conjunction with key NGOs, Ministry of Health (MOH), National Cancer Society etc. Some other normal companies also may invite them to help organize health awareness activities on special occasions like the company’s health week. Or sometimes the department organizes public forum for people like us to attend and discuss about common stuff like hand, foot and mouth disease, vaccinations etc. It’s more like reminding people of the company brand, and at the same time bringing educational awareness more towards the public (non-medical) community.

Recently, MSD also partnered with the MOH and few other pharma companies to set up an public awareness website. Go check out www.immunise4life.my. Its one of the many examples that the consumer brand department deal with, again, educating the public. We were also given a task to brainstorm something that can spread awareness about this website (apart from typing it here). So we gave them something like this (initially I just wanted to briefly explain that there’s such a thing call 9gag and meme but Vshenn and Rebecca did one anyway lol). They said this was something totally new and impressive, like WOW! And that is why it’s so important for companies to keep up with modern times…

One thing that was pointed out in the consumer brand session was that there is a need to educate people, even healthcare professionals, on awareness about HIV patients. There seems to be a prevalent stigma towards these patients, like healthcare practitioners deliberately distancing themselves from any body contacts with them, or even down to the most ridiculous things such as banning them from touching doorknobs! It is so important that pharma companies educate the public, especially students, to tackle these social issues relating to health.

Moving on, we finally got our briefing on our project assignment (OMG!). It’s basically making a proposal on how to raise awareness and increase public access to medicine, in our case, on contraceptives. So we gotta research on what has been going on in the contraceptives market and then find out solutions how to ensure that the target patient groups get more access to these medicines, instead of contributing to unintended pregnancies and worse, baby dumping. Roughly 3 weeks more to prepare…. T.T

laughing while we still can....jkjk XD

Anyway, the business research department also came to deliver their session. I personally think this department is as similar as business research departments of other companies. The difference is knowing how things are done in the real market, how sales are made, what are the key factors relating to medicinal use, and all those pharmaceutical jargons which I think you will need a medical science background to understand what’s going on. 

We were also given another little task: to read through a business research report and extract its important points. These points are used for the company directors to make informed decisions on their business tactics and stuff like that. That’s just the surface of what this department do, as they also have to plan on how to gather data from the market, sort of like a “clinical trial” on the market.

Not much pictures for today, look out more for tomorrow’s visit to Zuellig distribution centre!