STRATEGY
By copying the aviation industry, you can make sure your marketing strategy will fly In life sciences, such as pharma and medtech, marketing strategies often fail to deliver on their promises. This is because, to work effectively, 5 critical factors must align perfectly. Researchers refer to this as the swiss cheese model because it is like seeing through a cheese when all the holes must align. In this article, Professor Smith describes those five factors and how to manage their alignment to ensure that your strategy delivers what it promises. Brian D Smith, Principal Advisor, PragMedic
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P H A RM A F O C U S A S I A
ISSUE 41 - 2020
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s you look at your newly-written marketing plan, you might want to reflect for a moment how much it resembles an airliner: it took a lot of effort to build, you want to be as sure as you can be that it will fly and not crash but once it takes off it is difficult to repair. The biggest difference between a marketing strategy and an airliner is that, whilst air crashes are extremely rare, research shows that the majority of marketing strategies crash, in the sense that they
