By Noah M. Pines

Introduction: This is for you, Steve

Steve Schlesinger, you’re welcome. Because hopefully what I am writing should bring more biopharma company marketing teams back to your facilities, facilities that those of us who have been in the industry for a long time spent an outsize part of our early career when we were launching brands in the 1990’s and 2000’s.

We used to joke about the offbeat or ill-mannered respondents, long days when completing 8-10 interviews was the norm, and the omnipresent jars of M&Ms that kept the clients conscious and awake in the dark back rooms. At the same time, my nostalgia-lensed view is that this was a kind of golden era of health care marketing research. Being in a marketing research facility watching customer interviews or focus groups was a high-fidelity learning experience, a bonding event, but more importantly, it was a time when the team could truly focus – without much distraction – on the customer.

Things have changed in the past 10 or so years. Largely gone are the storied days when teams used to spend a week or two doing a “road show,” where you would be in and out of different cities (or countries), working out of marketing research facilities by day, dining in fine restaurants by night, and then groggily traveling through planes, trains and automobiles to the next destination the next day for more.