Should healthcare marketing even exist?

Looking at the world as someone with training in science, healthcare marketing doesn’t really make sense. In my science-brain eutopia, governments would put aside a budget into an international academic pharmaceutical evaluation consortium (an international version of NICE), and ban pharmaceutical marketing and any form of medical communications linked to sponsor pharma companies all together. 100% of data produced by research organisations would be shared, failure scrutinised and quarried for potential just as much as success. Drugs would be distributed and prescribed based on merit and merit alone.

Even if it was possible and practical to get everyone around the world to sign up to, I'm not sure my idea of pharmaceutical information-sharing and recommendation-making eutopia would live up to my hopes for it. Most people, even trained academics and clinicians, don’t make perfect, rational decisions (Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein and Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman explain why). Even if presented with empirical data from my aforementioned consortium, clinicians would most likely still have inherent biases that would mean the drugs they prescribed to a person weren’t necessarily the best drugs for them.

Which is of course why our job as healthcare communicators and marketers carries so much responsibility. But responsibility - for integrity, fair representation of the facts, and support to overcome cognitive biases - aside, our job as healthcare communicators also carries so much opportunity.

And this is where the worlds of mainstream and healthcare marketing collide - both can, and should, strive to create brands that mean even more in their audience’s heads and hearts than they do to their bodies. Because when they do that, the world is a better place.