BW: Debbie, you’ve recently hit the headlines following the revelations of your involvement with the marketing of Phoni’s controversial antidepressant, Saloadatat. The drug had been associated with thousands of deaths and yet right up to its eventual withdrawal you were sending e-mails to field sales representatives, stating that Saloadatat was “death neutral”. How did you justify such an assertion?
DB: One of the things I learnt very early on in my pharmaceutical marketing career was to tell senior management only what they wanted to hear. Going on about negative trivia such as customers going psychotic or suicidal soon gets you marked down as someone who isn’t a team player. Saloadatat may have caused suicides in patients but I wasn’t going to commit career suicide by telling my bosses that. So it became simply a question of finding data to support the outcome we most wanted, as usual. That’s what clinical data and marketing is all about, after all.
That must have been quite a challenge given the weight of negative data on Saloadatat...
You’re right. And I was really struggling until I remembered a conversation I’d had with one of my more experienced field sales staff. I’d asked him how he still managed to keep his quota of Saloadatat up despite all of the negative news about the drug’s side effects. “Doctors are living proof that there’s one born every minute,” he replied. So I figured that if there is one born every minute, this would just about offset the mortality rate we were seeing with Saloadatat. That’s how we were able to justify calling the drug “death neutral”…
You left Phoni soon after to set up your own marketing management consultancy. Why was that?
My experiences at Phoni taught me that there really was a huge demand for self-serving bullshit and so having built a reputation, I thought I’d offer my talent for mendacity to a wider marketplace.
How important is reputation in the world of consultancy?
DB: Reputation is everything. It’s the only thing that prevents you from being held accountable for your actual results. Look at the really big consultancy firms like McKinsey’s, for example. They’ve built a massive reputation as turnaround experts over the past twenty years, just by telling companies that they can solve all of their problems by downsizing ten percent of their headcount. No-one ever remembers the catalogue of bankruptcies and hostile takeovers that such a simplistic approach has caused. They only remember the big names McKinsey’s have worked for. Reputation is the key.
So what areas are you currently working in?
DB: My company, Travesty MarketingÔÒ, is providing strategic consultancy to a wide range of industries, with a particular focus on creating future focused disease area scenarios and building winning brand strategy...
Meaning…?
Er, I’ll get back to you on that one. But you’ve probably heard about the very exciting work we’ve been doing with Godstone Farm in Surrey…
Isn’t that the place responsible for over 80 cases of E. coli in schoolchildren?
Yes. We’ve been working on the “Shit Is Sugar” hygiene campaign in operation there. It’s been a great success. Just like our “White Is Black” campaign for Nottinghamshire County Council…
…where deaths caused by accidents on zebra crossings are up by 40%?
That’s right. But as I was able to demonstrate in my earlier career, there’s one born every minute, so…
Er, yes indeed. Thanks for your time, Debbie…
Unrelated tales from the parallel universe of reality can be found here and here…
No comments:
Post a Comment