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Marketing Superstars - Hitting the Target
Karen Dawes, senior vice president for marketing and sales, Bayer Corp., West Haven
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2/21/2000
By: Michele Beck
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Since earning her MBA from Harvard 15 years ago, Karen Dawes has worked in the specialized field of pharmaceutical marketing. For the past nine months she has been vice president of marketing and sales for the Bayer Corp., where she oversees a field force of 1,300 as well as the entire marketing department.
Throughout her career, Dawes has drawn on her Harvard training in taking an analytical approach to problems, and describes this approach as a cornerstone of her success.
That success has been considerable. Although she has not been at Bayer long enough to have achieved quantifiable results, during her years at Pfizer and American Home Products, Dawes marketed a number of products that now generate more than $1 billion in annual sales.
“In marketing, it is important to have an analytical base for your solutions,” she says. Being innovative and creative is also important, but Dawes says the approach she learned in business school “helps me to be creative in an analytical and quantitative way.”
Dawes relies heavily on the data obtained from market research. “People looking at an advertisement don't realize the market research that goes into it,” she says. In fact, Dawes says that one of the biggest changes that she has seen in her decade and a half in marketing is the greatly increased sophistication of market data that is available thanks to advances in technology. This, she says, has made ever more accurate and on-target marketing solutions possible.
One of the biggest challenges pharmaceutical marketers have faced in recent years has been the introduction of direct-to-consumer marketing of prescription drugs. “This has added a whole new level of complexity to our marketing,” says Dawes. “At Pfizer we were among the first to reach out to patients,” she says, noting that the approach to patients has grown over the last few years, starting with television, then adding magazines, and now utilizing the Internet.
Dawes' own approach to direct marketing to consumers is to “provide education and options.” She believes it is critical to get information out to the consumer on the different diseases and conditions new drugs are designed to treat, then to “give the patient an understanding of the options that are out there.” She points out that “No one expects a patient to be able to evaluate whether a particular medication is appropriate for them.”
The explosion of the Internet in particular has been a challenge for marketers in the pharmaceutical industry. One of the most common reasons for surfing the Net is to find health-care information.
“Doctors tell you all the time - patients come in with printouts and ask, 'Should I try this medication?'” says Dawes. “Everyone is facing the whole consumer influence. It's something everyone is trying to come to terms with.”
Dawes says that her department at Bayer is currently looking at the ways the Internet is being used in the pharmaceutical industry and trying to determine how Bayer can use it best. She notes that while some companies are selling drugs online, Bayer currently is not planning to go that route. Its focus instead is on using the Internet to get information out about different diseases, including some more sophisticated educational programs aimed at physicians, not consumers.
Another challenge Dawes faces is the imminent launch of several new Bayer products. One launch that she is working on currently is for a new drug, Avelox, which is used to treat respiratory tract infections such as sinusitis and bronchitis. New product launches, however, are something she finds “always exciting.”
While Dawes relies heavily on thorough market research and analysis, she is also quick to point out the importance, when planning a successful product launch, of such things as first-hand knowledge of one's customer base - and open-mindedness.
“The customer base is so complex, you have to know your customers, go out there and meet physicians, HMO managers, as well as patients,” she says. Dawes also stresses the need for any successful marketer to be open to doing things in a different way. “Sometimes you just have to be a little wild.”
What Dawes is doing clearly works for her as well as for her employers. And she loves what she does.
“Products are becoming much more sophisticated,” she says. “We will continue to see biotech products that are truly lifesavers. It makes me feel good that patients have access to these products.”
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