Heading to Where the Digital Puck is Going in Life Science Marketing
I honestly don’t know why this wouldn’t be top of your list, looking at, you know, in the spirit of not looking at where the puck is, but where the puck’s going, you have such an incredible opportunity to establish and create a business that’s future-proof. – Richard Milne, VP and Global Leader of eBusiness at Thermo Fisher Scientific
I started this conversation with Richard Milne around a case study he had on his LinkedIn profile about using a cloud solution to manage multiple life science marketing properties around the globe, but it turned into much more.
The original challenge (and opportunity) was to take advantage of each local team’s proximity to its customers to deliver exactly what is needed in each market. The more you can do that, the better. At the same time maintaining brand standards can be challenging in that situation as well.
Richard described for me all the considerations around building a global eBusiness platform beyond just a website including legal entities, quote to cash etc.
I was curious about what it takes to execute a project like that and the skill sets required. Richard tells me it’s something he thinks about all the time. In the long run it’s about more than digitizing all your marcom material. He sees a time when a new understanding of what digital marketing means takes hold. That means looking for people who think about delivering new marketing experiences, even through the product such as protocols, for example, and seeing how people use those protocols to inform new product development.
All of this requires an (ongoing) commitment from the highest levels within the company, all the way up to the CEO. It’s not a build it and be done scenario. It’s a constant effort.
If you are a small company, he says, this should be at the top of your priority list, because the best time to build a global digital marketing platform is now. It is an easier proposition for smaller companies who want to create a scalable asset that increases the value of your company and makes them more competitive.
About My Guest
Richard Milne is the Vice President and Global Leader of eBusiness at Thermo Fisher Scientific.
The Transcript
This transcript was lightly edited for clarity.
Chris: Hello everybody, today my guest is Richard Milne. He’s the Vice President and Global Leader of eBusiness at Thermo Fisher Scientific. Richard, welcome to the podcast.
Richard: Thanks a lot, man. Nice to be here.
Chris: So today we’re going to talk about the challenge of taking your (digital) marketing properties global and maintaining brand standards at the same time. I’ve seen that you did something like this at Life Technologies I think before you were acquired by Thermo Fisher, and maybe you’ve done something similar in the past. But when you did that project at Life Tech what were the problems you were seeing that led to a new way of doing things?
Richard: Well, I think it was problems and opportunities, right?
Chris: Right.
Richard: To begin with you start with the opportunities. So the opportunities were what’s happening across the world, and principally at that time what’s happening in Asia. But now we see tremendous opportunities emerging in emerging markets in Eastern Europe and Russia and Latin America and those sorts of places. So reasonably good market understanding of what the opportunity is, is the first thing. And then as you start thinking about what is the execution path, what do you have to go do, if you like, then you start thinking about what are the problems you’re going to encounter. And I think probably the biggest one that we came up with was whilst there was a lot of opportunity, there wasn’t necessarily the business readiness. And that’s the biggest issue that we, I guess continue to come up with, right. Build it and they will come doesn’t work. And so thinking through the organizational design to go to market, go to cash, the legal entities, all of the other pieces that you need if you’re going to try and go e-commerce in China or e-commerce in Japan, or e-commerce in Brazil or whatever, are just as important as the technical capabilities of building and delivering a website, right?
Chris: Right, yeah. I love that you mentioned the business readiness, and that’s I guess kind of that area I want to talk about most. I mean, I read your case study on LinkedIn, and you talked about a cloud solution that you implemented, largely so that you could give the local markets their opportunity to communicate with their customers, and yet at the same time make sure that you maintain the brand standards. Can you describe how that worked in a physical sense?
Richard: Yeah I mean it’s a complicated problem, right? Because you’ve got naturally from a marketing perspective, the closer you can put your marketing professionals to the market, the better they’ll be, the more in touch with the market they’ll be, the more aware of pricing competitive dynamics and everything else they will be. So if you start from the principle that it’s good to have marketing people very connected to their markets in order to be as effective and impactful as you can, then on the other side you’ve got this notion that says “But I want to maintain product quality. I want to maintain brand value and brand equity and brand standards.” So you’ve got to find a way where you can distribute the capability to people, wherever they may be, whilst at the same time you can kind of retain an ability to see and to oversight on things. We used Adobe for a lot of that, I mean there was an Adobe Suite now I think which has got all sorts of different capabilities in it, whether it’s the Adobe Experience Manager or the analytics or the Adobe Media Optimizer, we used all of those things. And what it did was it allowed us to have a central team that was driving forward the technology and the capabilities, but equally allowed us to distribute our marketing organizations out into the various different regions, so that they could be very connected with the market. So I think that’s one of the core benefits of having these globally deployed marketing technologies these days, is that you can kind of have both of those sides of the coin which is very important.
Chris: Definitely. I’ve experienced that sort of challenge in the past. And I’m curious how far down or how far out does that local marketing capability go? In other words, I’m thinking about e-commerce, maybe your local marketing teams are putting up web pages about different products and so on. But are they filling in product details on a local level, in local languages or no? So that’s all centralized?
Richard: We manage the entitlements which is what we call it, where you’re localizing the catalogue and turning skews on and off that sort of thing. We manage all of that centrally. But again, that just goes down to a question of what’s the most efficient way of sort of designing and building the resources that you’ve got. If you have a different starting point you might end up a slightly different end point, it all depends on where you’re starting. If I could be entirely strategic about it, and if I could do it all again, I think I would be much more mindful and probably much more global in my perspective. There is no reason why you couldn’t have for example a very, very hardcore high-end analytics team based out of somewhere like India or your skew enablement team based in China. We moved some of our web production capabilities out to China, which was a very good move for us. I think you just need to be, you need to be thoughtful about what works best for any given circumstance.
Chris: Right. That’s interesting in and of itself. That’s a nice transition to what I wanted to talk about next, actually. So one of your colleagues, Hrissi Samartzidou has been on the podcast back in the spring, and I met her when she spoke a couple of weeks ago at the ACPLS annual meeting, and the topic she talked about both on the podcast and in the meeting is, how do we evolve life science marketing to keep up with the way our customers are evolving and the experience that they expect? And she mentioned one of the things she thinks about is the need for a different kind of skill sets in our industry as we get better and better at digital marketing and really trying to catch up to many other industries. So did you have to think about new kinds of skill sets when you implemented this global solution?
Richard: Still do, they’re changing all the time. I mean, my feeling about it, and I know Hrissi well as you know, but my feeling about it looking at it from a digital marketing perspective is that you’ve had V1 of digital marketers, right? It was considered innovative to go and get people that you call digital marketers. But what those people are interested in was essentially taking offline marketing and putting it online. So I didn’t do brochures anymore, I did emails. And I didn’t do events and trade shows, I did webinars and it was very much the same idea of pushing out. I really passionately believe that we are heading into a kind of V2 of digital marketing, where those sorts of things, I mean that’s marcoms online, which is what that prescribes. What’s going to happen next is we’re going to get into a world where people much more profoundly understand what digital marketing is all about, and I think that’s to do with much less about trying to digitize your marcom or trying to digitize your offline marketing, and it’s about thinking about the nature of the product itself, and thinking about how you can enhance and evolve a product based upon the digital capabilities you’ve got.
And that can be as simple as some kind of connectivity, but increasingly what it will mean is that marketing becomes about the product experience as much it does about the marketing message. I think if you consider the notion that you would in the future, when you launch a product, the selection guide, the product connectivity to the internet, the ability to monitor, maintain, reorder, reuse, track, understand, you know all of those things will be part of the marketing. I would far rather having a digital marketing person who’s thinking about how I can automatically download protocols from a particular location, than I would have somebody who’s talking about how they can take a flyer that was made and make it into a digital asset that can then be fired out to people. Because ultimately that firing of product content to customers for them to consume was gonna become a game of the past I think.
Chris: Yeah, and at the same time they’re downloading those protocols back home you’re tracking which protocols are popular so you can get a sense of the direction…a particular field in biology might be moving, or what experiments are more popular, what new products might need to be developed.
Richard: And there in itself is the virtue of cycle. So listening to our customers will be less about sitting across the table and listening to them, it will be more about analyzing what they do and servicing our customers will be less about sending them materials into their inbox, telling them how incredibly brilliant we are, and more about creating product experiences and digital experiences online that will be so compelling and so innovative that they will not be able to do their science without them. That should be the test for us as marketing people that we should be bringing forward customer experiences that fundamentally support our users in their daily jobs. That’s good marketing these days, I think.
Chris: I love it. I have a big grin on my face. I like to say, I like to think about making our marketing as innovative as the tools we’re trying to sell, right.
Richard: That’s right.
Chris: I’m just curious about, making that kind of transformation, what does it take? Now I’m going to go into how does a company make this happen? First with making the case, the business case based on your opportunity, as you mentioned, and then with execution, I guess, just a general level of effort, broad approach so people start thinking.
Richard: It depends. There’s a few things I think that you should probably bear in mind. Number one, this is not an annual thing, this is something where you need to have commitment for the long-term, and so at Life Technologies we were investing in e-commerce for 10 years, right. And at Thermo Fisher there’s an absolute hunger to invest in it. So it’s not something that happens once and it’s often difficult for us as digital marketing professionals or e-business leaders or whatever, because you will get from your finance community, when do I stop doing this? And it doesn’t feel comfortable to say, well you never stop doing it, but that’s actually the answer that you need to give. So that’s one piece. The second piece is, it’s very, very important to have organizational readiness at the highest levels. So in every case where we’ve been doing these large-scale projects and investments and such like, there has been direct support from the CEO. So it may not be that it has to be the CEO, it may be that there’s enough budget sitting within the CMO or within the CIO or somewhere else, but you’ve got to have see sweet support. And so you could always start small, you could be innovative about things, but you’ve got to have that level of support.
And the third thing is you need to invest in experts. It’s funny, we were sitting in a room the other day, having a bit of a summit, and as I looked around I realized that sat in the room were in various, you call them webmaster or owners of the site, web managers, but we had the webmaster if I want to use that old term, from Gibco, Invitrogen, Applied Biosystems and Pierce Antibodies, the molecular biology site of Thermo Fisher, Molecular Probes, Ambion, and then also things like Dynal, I can’t remember the other ones, and even people who run things like scripts, all sat in the room. There was literally hundreds of years of experience of running and managing websites in that space. And that’s something that’s incredibly valuable to have that level of expertise, whether it’s in content or commerce. The assets that matter, you know, the people who built the molecular probes, handbook online originally, the people who built the first selection guides for Gibco, the people who built the initial e-commerce engine for Invitrogen, were all sat there. That seemed valuable, right.
Chris: Right. And that actually is a nice transition to my next question. So obviously the huge amount of experience Thermo Fisher has brought in, all this talent, not to mention products, with all their acquisitions, what about a small company? First of all there must be a transition point wherein a company says, okay, now it’s time to do this, how would they know that? And is it possible for a small company to do something like this or does it just not make sense?
Richard: It makes a lot more sense. If I was sitting in, I don’t know what you call a small company, but let’s say that I was sitting in a company that does $100 million, $300 million, maybe that’s a bit too much, something like that. I honestly don’t know why this wouldn’t be top of your list, looking at, you know, in the spirit of not looking at where the puck is, but where the puck’s going, you have such an incredible opportunity to establish and create a business that’s future-proof. It’s actually far far more difficult for a company like Thermo Fisher Scientific to do that than it is for a small new company. Because for us, in Thermo Fisher Scientific, we’ve got so much legacy baggage, right, it’s difficult to move fast. We’ve got multiple pieces, multiple legal entities and supply chains and blah blah blah, you name it. In a small company you tend to be able to manage your supply chain much more efficiently, you tend to be able to be much more closely connected with your CRM database and everything else like that. You can easily and cheaply plug in your marketing automation, your communications capabilities, and so for an absolute fraction of the price that we have to pay for things, you can get up and running and start competing really, really easily, and far more than in actual fact building out the sales force, you can actually look at building out that digital experience. I mean Abcam and NEB and all sorts of other people have done exactly that, where they have really gone after the digital experience as a way of differentiating themselves, and I think very successfully. So my argument would be as a small company that would be the top of my list and I would certainly want a CMO or a marketing director who knew that that was the most important thing to do, as opposed to putting on trade shows, right?
Chris: Nice, yeah, I like that, that’s a great answer. I totally understand the legacy challenge. When I worked at Varian we had the same challenge, we were acquiring companies, many, many legacy systems, and integrating all of those, whereas if you were a small company, just a few products, you can create this experience like you said, and actually I’m hoping to get Andy Bertera from NEB on the podcast to talk about something like that. But also if you’re on this track, that type of marketing program would or would not, I can’t imagine it wouldn’t, make you more attractive target for purchase, if that was your strategy, to be bought out, right?
Richard: Sure, it’s an asset, and it really is an asset, if you have that capability. It becomes a very scalable asset. You look at what Thermo Fisher has done, or what we’ve done here at Thermo Fisher since the purchase of Life Technologies, we have done everything we can to squeeze every pip out of Life Technologies’ e-commerce capability, and that’s been very successful, and I think that’s the right thing to have done.
Chris: Right. Well, Richard Milne, this has been a fantastic conversation, I’ve enjoyed the whole thing with a big smile on my face, because it’s really insightful and tied together a number of themes that have been crossing this podcast over the last year or so, and this whole idea of a digital transformation, I love what you said, it’s not just putting your marcom online, it’s an entirely new experience for the customer and the company in terms of how they learn about their customers. So, thank you very much for your time.
Richard: It’s a pleasure. Look, if anybody has got any further questions, I’m very happy to answer questions if people want to reach out to me. Wish you best of luck with your podcast. It seems like an exciting endeavor to be going through.
Chris: It absolutely is, thank you.
