Achieving content excellence in life sciences through glocalization

25 Oct 2022

For decades, life sciences organizations have relied on a global or centralized operating model to deliver content to its customers across geographies and markets. However, the change in customer expectations and behaviors have rendered their traditional and unidimensional content operating models unsustainable. Companies are now forced to find scalable ways to deliver personalized content that resonates with their target audience whilst maintaining a consistent brand identity across geographies. This requires them to rethink their content operating models and adopt transformative strategies to enable a robust global-to-local content supply chain.

In an enlightening panel discussion at the Indegene Digital Summit 2022, Saket Malhotra, Libby Driscoll, Michael Kurr, Margot O'Neil, and Thomas Thestrup-Terp talk about how life sciences organizations can “stretch the content dollar” and drive “glocalization” of content to deliver personalized customer experience at scale.

The key highlights of their session are summarized below.

“Marketers need to shift mindsets and focus on creating claims and modules instead of assets and tactics.” - Libby Driscoll, VP, Global Commercial Services @ Eli Lilly

Modular content has the power to bring scale and efficiency to life sciences’ content operations without raising marketing costs exponentially. It also reduces time to market, ensures consistency across channels, improves content performance tracking, and most importantly, speeds up the glocalization of content. However, to truly drive content modularization, marketers can no longer focus on creating assets and tactics for individual campaigns. They need to shift mindsets and prioritize creating claims, modules, grids, and templates that can be pre-approved and assembled into a plethora of assets. Doing so will enable the scalable glocalization of content and support organizations to realize their omnichannel ambitions.

“A content supply chain does not have to be completely modular- striking the right balance between master and modular content is vital.” - Margot O'Neil, Head of CX and Content Strategy @ GSK

The journey toward complete modularization of content is not easy. It requires a digital-first mindset, a tech-enabled content supply chain, and a skilled workforce to fine-tune and streamline operations. Making these changes involves significant temporal, physical, and monetary investments. Organizations need to, therefore, learn how to assimilate modular content into their current operations and strike the right balance between master and modular content to uplift their experiences.

“A tech-enabled digital factory provides not just technical, but also organizational infrastructure that is needed to pilot and scale new content model.” - Michael Kurr, Head of Global GTM Services @ Boehringer Ingelheim International

To execute any new content operating model, organizations need to run several pilots to measure their feasibility, efficiency, and scalability. A tech-enabled content supply chain enables organizations to do with a sense of ease. It empowers them with a technical and organizational framework to try out and scale any content operating model while saving time and costs. Drawing from his experience at Boehringer Ingelheim, Michael shared that they built a global digital production factory over the last 3 years that supported an offshore-operated content model, which separated creative from production work, drove cost efficiencies, and supported its “most important” digital channels.

“To keep up with the regulatory pressures, tweak your funnels for different assets as per the brand’s maturity.”- Thomas Thestrup-Terp, VP @ Novo Nordisk

Medical, Regulatory and Legal (MLR) review has a profound impact on the marketing production process and timelines, efficiency of marketing workflows, and budgets. To keep up with the diverse regulatory requirements, brands should customize their content funnels as per the brand’s maturity. For example, assets created to support a campaign for a mature brand can have a shorter review time through the reuse of content from previously run campaigns. Moreover, modular content has the power to further shorten and streamline the MLR review and approval process. By creating and storing a repository of pre-approved modules and templates along with business rules, marketers can create a multitude of assets quickly and at scale.

“Strike the right balance between centralization and decentralization of content creation, aligned with your digital omnichannel execution”- Saket Malhotra, Head of Commercial Information Management & Enablement @ Ipsen

In order to create glocal content at scale, brands need to establish workflows that support a content feedback loop and collaboration between global and local teams. Pure decentralization is not the answer to scalable content personalization. Striking the right balance between centralized and decentralized methods of content creation, ensuring that the content flow is ‘bi-directional’, aligning your content strategy with the overall omnichannel execution strategy, and adopting an agile digital operating model, can help organizations set up a successful global-to-local content supply chain.