Powerful Potion

While drugmakers' Web sites generally scored high on privacy and personal data protection, they scored low on interactivity. "The Web puts some control in the hands of the consumer, [and] the consumer is looking for a dialogue now," says Terry Golesworthy, Customer Respect Group's president. "That's a fundamental business problem."

Most pharmaceutical companies use customer-relationship-management applications from vendors such as SAP and Siebel Systems Inc. to manage their relationships with health-care professionals, but few have applied that experience to their consumer audience. That's not surprising since these companies have spent decades dealing with physicians, and it was only in 1997 that the FDA loosened restrictions on advertising prescription drugs directly to consumers. Some of the biggest CRM deals in the industry remain focused on the traditional customers: Last month Germany's Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH, one of the industry's 20 largest companies, said it's implementing Siebel CRM applications to 6,000 sales and marketing staffers in 24 countries to provide comprehensive views of 1.5 million physicians and hospital professionals.

Pfizer has taken the next step, using CRM applications from Siebel to manage its consumer marketing campaigns, including sending materials on diseases and Pfizer products to consumers based on their opt-in profiles. "CRM in the pharmaceutical industry is still pretty young. But I think we're getting better at it," Vega says.

Generally, pharmaceutical companies still are experimenting with what kinds of technology and processes they require to meet patients' needs. "Along with that will come an evolution in the IT infrastructure in data management, campaign management, and predictive analytics," says Elizabeth Boehm, a Forrester Research health-care and life-sciences senior analyst. "The marketing proposition is still evolving, so it's hard to justify the IT infrastructure spending to support it."

To some extent, the pharmaceutical industry is a Johnny-come-lately to the Internet in terms of developing its business model, acknowledges John Fish Sr., global E-business director at AstraZeneca plc. Like nearly all drug manufacturers, AstraZeneca uses its Web site to back up advertising by offering information about diseases and treatments. The company is in the early stages of developing a CRM strategy for the consumer market and plans to make its Web site more interactive. That includes developing standard processes for collecting, managing, and using customer data to get a single view of a consumer across its product lines. AstraZeneca also is considering having patients report "adverse events," or side effects of using the company's drugs, and improving patient-to-patient communications through newsgroups and Weblogs, Fish says.

Schering-Plough already has increased its online dialogue with patients. It offers services and information about hepatitis C through its Be In Charge site for users of its Peg-Intron drug, including health-diary forms patients can download, fill out, and take to their physicians. Schering-Plough expanded the site's interactive capabilities earlier this month to let patients sign up for E-mail reminders for taking the daily pills and weekly injections, as well as for therapy, laboratory tests, and other appointments. "Using the Web site more is a big change from the past," director Zonca says. "What we're trying to do now is offer other ways [for patients] to learn about the disease state."

Schering-Plough's Be In Charge services are more extensive than those the company offers for its other pharmaceutical products. Hepatitis C patients generally need more support because of the social and psychological issues around the disease. But the company, which develops most of the applications that run on its site in-house, would consider providing similar online capabilities for other drugs, such as an HIV product now in development, that require long-term therapy and patient support, Zonca says.

It's clear the pharmaceutical industry is evolving its relationship with consumers even as consumers evolve in their expectations. "The Internet is just another medium for providing information," Pfizer's Cassese says. And getting it back, too, which the pharmaceutical industry will increasingly find as it further opens up a direct dialogue with the people who use its products.

With Jennifer Zaino

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Data Flow: Tracking Consumers