Topic: Pharma Brand Management

Pharmaceutical companies know the bottom-line effects of a wide range of corporate risks. The last two years of the COVID-19 pandemic and the race to develop vaccines upended all normalcy in risk management for pharma communicators. Health topics dominated online and offline conversations on a global basis and medical misinformation was rampant and uncontrolled. This digital chatter ushered in a new, disruptive normal as our Communications Leaders Risk Survey: Pharma Edition reveals. These pharma communications professionals are stepping up to the challenge, however, and seeking risk intelligence solutions to protect their global enterprises and proactively mine digital chatter to identify an issue before it escalates into a full-blown crisis.

Now that the COVID-19 vaccines are being distributed globally, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. A light that, while signaling a return to some sort of normalcy by year’s end, has put pharma companies in the public eye like no other time in recent memory. They are not only confronted with a complex environment of meticulous oversight of industry and government regulators but also a more complicated social media landscape.

It seems no good deed goes unpunished on social media.

Social media use is exploding, and the pharmaceutical industry could be in for a major headache.

With COVID-19 vaccines now in distribution, pharma brands are on high alert as they anticipate a surge of misinformation on social media.

As of July 2020, the number of global internet users has grown to 4.8 billion, which is more than half the world’s population. At the same time, digital advertising in pharma is expected to increase to a projected $10 billion for the year. This is because consumers are spending more time engaging with health content than content from any other industry, including news, finance, and travel—and are using social media to find it.