DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION SERIES - Fall in love with the problem, not the solution

Over the last three years we've tackled the challenges of digital transformation in healthcare. Now, this year I want to take this series even further – to spark connections, inspire change, and drive meaningful transformation that improves outcomes for healthcare professionals, but more importantly for patients.

I feel really passionate about helping pharma professionals feel confident using technology to improve their engagement with healthcare professionals. That's why I've been interviewing inspiring leaders to learn from their experience and also give them a platform to share their insights with you. I'm really thrilled to welcome Nico Renner, Product Manager in Oncology at BeiGene from Switzerland .

You’ve probably seen Nico's posts on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicorenner/), but in case you haven't, Nico is not your typical pharma marketeer. He considers himself a hybrid between business and biotechnology, because he studied both. Nico started working on digital transformation projects in oncology while he was at Roche in Germany. He’s also gathered experience in social media management for patient education in ophthalmology.

What I love about Nico is he brings a new perspective and fresh questions to pharma. He’s not one of us who's been around forever – he doesn't even know what the old days were like! He's a millennial (or Gen Z), and he sees things from a fresh perspective. Nico is a firm believer in outcome-driven marketing, and his signature approach is “no shiny slides, but tangible results.” He believes that marketing is not about opinion, but about data. When he's not redefining the marketing playbook, you can find him sparking thoughtful discussions on LinkedIn about the future of pharma marketing, digital engagement, and customer experience in pharma. In fact, he was named one of the top 12 experts in marketing and omnichannel engagement to follow in 2025!

Before we start, Nico is representing his own views, not his employer's.

Why Pharma?

Mehrnaz: Why did you choose to pursue a career in pharma? Tell me about your story.

Nico: That's an easy question. First of all, when I first came into contact with biology – that was in school – I was just fascinated by molecular biology and chemistry and how the human body worked. Specifically cancer. Even though it's not a nice topic to talk about, I found it fascinating from a biological perspective, how your cells could choose a totally different path and cause these horrible diseases.

Joining pharma was an accumulation of coincidences. After studying biology, doing internships, getting to know people, it just kind of happened. Now, what I really enjoy about the industry – and I enjoy it more every year, is that you have this purpose of doing something meaningful for the world, for people. It sounds cheesy, but I think all of us who work in this industry love that about it. When I started studying biology I was just fascinated by the science. Now I have a bigger picture – maybe I just grew up and see more meaning in life – that was the reason why I stayed in pharma (or the healthcare industry in general).

An Evolving Perspective on Digital Transformation

Mehrnaz: Reflecting on your journey from Roche to BeiGene, how has your perspective on digital transformation in pharma evolved?

Nico: I hope it has evolved – that's the goal: to evolve and improve, right? If I look at the entire industry, I started in 2021 at Roche, and back then the whole omnichannel hype – the big wave – had already started. Everybody wanted to do something digital, measure everything, get the same customer experience as Amazon and Spotify. There was a huge hype around it.

I think we've turned it down a bit by now, because we realised, okay, if we measure everything but we don't actually have time to act on it, then what's the point? The ambition of being the next Netflix of pharma is a bit weird, because we're not entertainment – we work in science. There are a few learnings I’ve seen across the industry. For example, even the word "omni" – Latin for "everything" – made us think we needed to do everything, every channel imaginable, to be omnipresent. Now we realise it's like playing piano: you can press all the keys at once, but it's not going to be music. Sometimes it's enough to press three keys to make music. In terms of using channels: if you use three channels where your customers are present, and they use those channels a lot, that's more effective than using fifty channels but not measuring the right things and getting overwhelmed.

So, I feel like we went from doing everything (because it needed to be digital and fancy) to asking, where does digital actually make sense? We started questioning a lot of things as an industry, which I think is good.

Mehrnaz: I think from a consumer point of view, if all the companies we shop from just send us communication through every channel, it's overwhelming. It also makes you think they don't know you at all. Netflix, for example, communicates and makes suggestions quite subtly without being intrusive. But pharma’s approach to engaging HCPs has always been "let’s just throw the kitchen sink at it and see what sticks." We didn't evolve for years – the only evolution I saw in pharma for thirty years was going from printed detail aids to having them on an iPad. Then the pandemic happened and suddenly we thought, "Whoopsie, we need to do something about this!" The real evolution has happened in the last few years, but I still don’t think the mindset fully shifted. It was more like, "Let's do everything we did before and then chuck it through all the channels and see what sticks," rather than understanding what's relevant. Because at the end of the day, when we make purchasing decisions, usually one or two things drive the decision – we don't need ten different reasons. We don't have that push–pull strategy in pharma communications. Would you agree?

Nico: I would agree. And that's probably not even specifically a digital transformation or channel problem, but a problem of how we create content. If I have ten features or characteristics that define my product, I can talk about all ten – but maybe only three actually have meaningful value to a physician or to a patient. So, for example, why would I talk about, say, mode of action if it's not relevant in that specific case? If we talk about ten things instead of three, we've already started off with too many messages in too many channels.

So, I think content creation – really figuring out what is the key pain point I want to address – is crucial. When it comes to push and pull, I'm not sure I've figured out the absolute truth in that regard, but if I look at Netflix, that's pure pull: I want to watch a Netflix series on my flight or on my sofa at night because it's entertainment to me.

Will clinical studies ever be entirely pull? A lot of people enjoy their work (I do as well), and sometimes it's hard to differentiate between work and life, but I would say if you have the choice between watching a movie with your family or reading clinical studies, the clinical studies are not entertainment. So, pull works in certain instances, but we’re not a consumer entertainment industry.

Where I do see a pull-like trend is with social media. I've had a lot of discussions around "If I post on social media, will I annoy people?" But the difference (compared to a website, or an email, or WhatsApp, etc.) is that social media has an algorithm helping you. The algorithm helps put your message out at a moment that is convenient for the recipient. The algorithm also assesses whether the content is relevant to your recipient. So, I feel like in social media it's more of a pull model, because I don't decide when you open up LinkedIn and scroll and see my post – that's totally up to you. I think social media is a channel where we came closer to pull rather than just push.

Data-Driven Marketing and Patient Outcomes

Mehrnaz: Can you think of a specific instance where data-driven marketing helped improve patient outcomes and led to more effective HCP engagement? And was that related to social media use or not?

Nico: Yes. The examples that intuitively come to mind are from social media, because it's just a platform where you can literally measure everything and iterate at incredible speed - compared to other channels. The impact is always a bit indirect in our industry, but an example I can share; back at Roche I was working on a patient app and we ran a campaign with A/B testing. We had basically the exact same ad with different variations – maybe the title, the visual, or the call to action would change. One example title was "Your life with this disease," and another was "Your fight against this disease." I thought "Your fight against" sounded very aggressive, and our entire team agreed it might be too aggressive. But we said, let's test it.

It turned out the click-through rate was three or four times higher with "Your fight against...". So, we all would have lost that bet! In terms of outcomes or impact, in the end, if you have a four-times higher click-through rate (or whatever your key metric is), then you can either reduce your budget (and use the surplus budget somewhere else where it makes a difference for patients – maybe in clinical studies), or you can achieve your results in a shorter period of time. Either way, you're getting more efficient outcomes with better-performing content. So, even with small examples like a simple A/B test – setting up two short URLs, for instance – you can create an impact (at least indirectly).

Mehrnaz: Data really speaks volumes, and that's so interesting. If someone has a chronic disease, they likely do feel they're "fighting" it, because they're dealing with medication side effects or symptoms – so "fight" resonates. 

I remember an insightful Marketing Director at Pfizer once said to me, "As marketeers we shouldn’t use market research as a crutch to lean on; we should use it as a lamp that lights our path." In other words, we shouldn't use research just to validate our assumptions – we should listen to it and act accordingly.

Nico: Listening is a great keyword for any marketer. I believe if you can't be humble, and if you care too much about your own opinion, you'll likely face issues in marketing – because it's not about your opinion, it's about the opinion of literally everyone else in your customer audience. Also, if you're a marketer and you think you know better than your customer-facing colleagues who see clients every day – well, you probably don't. You should listen to them. Being humble is, in my opinion, one of the key elements in marketing.

Mehrnaz: I love that. You shared a post recently about being on a field visit and listening to insights from the team. We really need to break down the silos between sales and marketing and work more closely, because the field will observe problems and marketing can come up with solutions to resolve them.

What Does Good Omnichannel Marketing Look Like?

Mehrnaz: Everybody's talking about omnichannel marketing, but not many describe what "good" looks like. What does good look like, in your view? And where do companies often go wrong when it comes to omnichannel marketing?

Nico: Ah, now we're getting into a more complicated, tricky question! Where do I start? Well, we're not here to debate definitions, right? But as I said in the beginning, I think the term "omni" itself is misleading. It suggests "everything."

First misconception; everyone thinks we need to do everything. You just don't have the capacity for that – unless you have all the AI tools in the world and everything is automated - and I personally don’t know of a case where that's possible. You simply don't have the capacity to use all channels.

Second; personalisation. This has been discussed a million times. What level of personalisation do you really need? Four years ago, when I started, everybody was saying that every HCP should receive a tailored message only for their needs. Yes, I agree in theory – in an ideal world, that would be wonderful. In practice, it's almost impossible to achieve at that granularity. So, where do we start? I think if you do a proper segmentation – say you segment your audience so that each segment is maybe 10%, 15%, 20% of your total audience – and you nail down what that 10% needs, then segmentation as such is already a form of personalisation. There's no need to write a completely different email for everyone, because what you want to achieve is that a person receives what he or she needs. I don't care if I receive the same message as you did, as long as it's helpful to me. It just needs to have my name - say, "Hello Nico" instead of "Hello Mehrnaz" - but beyond that, it's fine if it's the same content. So, I think extreme one-to-one personalisation is another misconception we have about omnichannel.

Third; we fell in love with the solution, not the problem. We got really excited about rolling out new channels – they were cool and shiny. Sometimes, I heard people joking, "We have more pilots than an airline," when talking about the pharma industry. We kept piloting new channels and then putting them in a drawer and never doing anything with them. We fell in love with doing digital, setting up analytics dashboards and so on, but we forgot to ask: Why are we doing this?

Which brings me to the actual question; what does good omnichannel marketing look like? I think it means being in the channels where your customers actually are, and where they are receptive to what you're communicating. But a huge part of omnichannel marketing is figuring out who you're talking to and what their problems are – really understanding their pain points – and then starting with your brand messaging and strategy to address those. Not the other way around (i.e. not starting with your brand story and then trying to find an audience to tell it to).

Mehrnaz: Thank you for sharing your perspective. Realistically, a lot of times in marketing we get distracted by shiny new things – we think "oh, this new tool is going to solve all our problems." But I think we often measure a lot of surrogate metrics rather than the absolute outcomes.

Also, reflecting on some presentations we both saw in Vienna: there's a concept emerging called "Opti-channel." We've had multi-channel, then omnichannel, and now opti-channel is this idea that when you have enough data to know which channels each segment prefers, you just focus communication on those channels and switch the rest off – because you don't need to blast every message through every channel. I think that's an interesting concept. I don't know whether you believe in it or agree with it?

Nico: Opti-channel – I absolutely agree with that. It really just emphasises the point I made: "omni" is misleading because people think they need to do everything.

Mehrnaz: I see that Marcus asked a question in the chat. He says, "How much revenue and sales do you think comes from face-to-face interaction, and how much of your budget would you allocate to omnichannel activities around that?"

Nico: I'm not sure I can give an exact percentage, but I would probably say at least two-thirds – maybe 70-80% – of our success is based on the relationships that people have with stakeholders in the healthcare industry. I'm a true believer that it is all about trust. Four years ago, we thought we could do digital launches – just send out email campaigns, set up nice web pages, and that's it. Now we've come to realise it's not that easy. It really is the face-to-face interaction that drives our conversations. So, I would say face-to-face is the main driver; you have your face-to-face colleagues at the centre of your universe, and whatever you do around that is complementary.

I do believe the omnichannel efforts are worth it, though. There are plenty of examples – emails, social media, WhatsApp – where digital facilitates the human interaction. These things are all part of the omnichannel universe, and that facilitation helps to improve face-to-face interactions. So, I'd say the majority of impact comes from face-to-face interactions, but digital can definitely help.

Mehrnaz: I think it varies from one geography to another. For instance, in the UK if you're relying solely on face-to-face communication, you're missing out on so many opportunities because access to HCPs is really difficult. Usually, the first channel HCPs prefer is email or other remote channels for engagement.

From my own experience – I do direct selling to healthcare professionals and account management – I'm based in the US but I'm influencing business in the UK at an Integrated Care Board (ICB) or health board level. Without good digital content from marketing, or without digital channels, we would not be able to achieve double-digit growth on the brands. You really need a blended approach. Instead of saying ‘face-to-face’ I might say ‘human-to-human’ connection – for example, video calls using Teams or Zoom can replicate what you'd have face-to-face if you're sharing relevant content with HCPs.

Nico: I mean, human interactions are also not free, if I may say it bluntly. I take Marcus's point, but when I said face-to-face earlier, I was referring to any sort of human interaction – it could be an in-person meeting, but it could also be WhatsApp messages (where it's compliant to use WhatsApp, by the way), or a Zoom call. The key is, it’s a human interaction that makes the difference in our industry.

And personally – and I guess Marcus doesn't have the numbers on this either, it's hard to measure in our industry – but there are data points supporting that digital tools help us engage with customers. We just need to pick the right ones and use them efficiently. That brings me back to my earlier point: obviously if you're trying to do fifteen digital channels at once and none of them are done with great quality, then the return on investment will be terrible. If you focus on three channels but use them really well, that makes all the difference. And by the way, if you use digital tools in a smart way, they are sometimes much cheaper than the old analog approaches we're used to. If you think about flyers, for example – calculate what you pay for printing a flyer, distributing it, all the working time involved. And if something changes or goes wrong, you have to reprint and redistribute. Compare that to how easy it is to set up a proper email campaign or to update a web page.

Long story short; no, I don't think it would be more profitable to just turn off all the digital channels.

Mehrnaz: I agree with Nico. In fact, let me give a quick example: I reached out to a senior consultant who leads a department, because I'm launching a new product on behalf of one of our clients. I emailed her, and she actually booked an appointment to see me. We met on Teams yesterday and had a conversation based on her needs. She was really interested; she asked me to email her some specific assets and a budget impact calculation. She's now going to discuss with her team, and we're going to meet in a couple of weeks in the UK.

For me, it's about the journey of taking the customer along step-by-step and responding to them based on what they need. You also have to give them tools so they can go and have those internal conversations.

I hope that answers your question, Marcus. Please don't stop omnichannel, because we see a lot of value in engaging HCPs.  

Mehrnaz: Carlos says, "Omnichannel is not about fancy platforms and hundreds of deliverables; it's about a balance of push and pull, ensuring relevant engagement." I couldn't have said it better. Nico, do you want to comment on Carlos’s point?

Nico: Yeah, that really is the description of what I meant by needing to fall in love with the problem, not the solution. Pharma fell in love with the solution – we had all these KPIs and we wanted to show how digital we were – instead of focusing on, did we solve the customer's problem? No, we focused on "how many digital channels can we set up?" I think the industry as a whole has realised that by now, and we're starting to adapt.

Mehrnaz: You often talk about this, and I love how you phrase "falling in love with the problem." How do you spend time to really understand the problem before you develop a solution? Because I think figuring that out would help us tailor our digital transformation strategies better.

Nico: Honestly, when you start in a new therapeutic area – and in my case, I'm young, I haven’t spent decades in the industry – the first thing you do is ask questions. If I want to learn about an indication in depth, I go to my medical colleagues and try to understand: What does the treatment algorithm look like in this condition? What do patients suffer from? What are the typical symptoms? How does the patient journey look? You can literally just ask your colleagues these things.

Then, I also believe in spending time with your customer-facing colleagues – out in the field, at congresses, at any external-facing events. That really opens your eyes.

Let me give a brief example of trying to understand the problem as a marketeer; if you're a textbook marketeer, you probably design your detail aid or presentation deck thinking, "Okay, these are the five slides, this is the story flow, and it will always happen in that order." Then you spend time in the field and realise, okay, these conversations never go as planned. You see that you need to be flexible – maybe prepare for different questions or detours in the conversation. You can't have twenty core messages, and you can't have a 20-slide deck that you expect to go through in order every time.

So essentially, asking your colleagues, your customers, and patients what things are like from their perspective – that is how you understand the problem. Of course, doing research and reading literature helps, but that will never transmit the feelings and nuances you get from talking to people.

My recommendation; if you start tomorrow as a product manager, go talk to your colleagues and ask as many questions as you need to really understand the problems that you, your clients, or patients have.

Mehrnaz: I agree with you. And Marcus made a really valid point here: he says sometimes we feel we are overcomplicating things. If we truly understood the problem, we could just go directly and address it. We don't need to bombard people with information – less is often more impactful. It also makes customers feel listened to, because our communication then relates to information they've shared, rather than us saying "I have to tell you everything."

Balancing Innovation with Compliance

Mehrnaz: How do you balance the need for innovation in digital marketing with the regulatory requirements that are essential in pharma? I often see teams use compliance as an excuse for not doing anything new. How do you navigate that?

Nico: This is my personal opinion again, I see the roles of Legal and Compliance as enablers, not the police. They are not blockers who wake up in the morning thinking, "Today, I'm going to say no to Nico." No, they're doing their job, and their job is very important. We're in a highly regulated industry for a reason. To stick to all those laws and to behave in a compliant way, you need their support.

What we sometimes do wrong – and by "we" I mean marketers, because I think I can speak for all of us – is we have tight deadlines, we're running behind, we're short on time, we need to deliver certain materials (as Carlos mentioned, lots of deliverables), and everything needs to go fast. So, you create this material and at the very end you're like, "Oh yeah, I need a Veeva approval!" Then you push it into Veeva and text your compliance colleague, "Hey, I need approval by tomorrow." That's not an ideal scenario. If I were a compliance manager in that case, I wouldn't like it either. You might get away with it once or twice if it's super urgent, but it happens too often.

So, I would propose; if you have an idea, go and check in with Compliance early. Even if you just have a rough draft or concept – say, "Hey, this is an idea I'd like to explore, what do you think?" Then you get early input, and you can either fail quickly and cheaply, or move forward with guidance. Basically, collaborate on it.

If you're innovating, think about why you're innovating. Are you doing it because you need an innovation project to show on a fancy dashboard? Or are you innovating to solve a customer problem? You can't repeat that question often enough. We all fall into the trap of doing something new for the sake of it, rather than to address a real need.

Mehrnaz: Thank you for sharing that. Last year I was involved in judging a compliance competition at a compliance conference – I'd never actually been to a compliance conference before! Just attending that conference, reading the case study entries and judging them, I found that the most innovative omnichannel strategies were developed when Compliance was involved at the early stage of ideation. They were used as an enabler rather than as the police or a brake.

The Double-Edged Sword of Digital Metrics

Mehrnaz: I love the way you use LinkedIn to communicate. In a recent post you said: "The good thing about digital marketing is that you can measure everything, and the bad thing is that you can measure everything." Can you expand on what you meant by this, please?

Nico: Sure. When I ran my first digital campaigns – three years ago, when the omnichannel hype demanded that we measure everything, so we could gather insights and act on them – I realised I had measured so many KPIs that just reading through them would take hours.

They were so complicated that even I didn't understand them anymore! And back then, I was a digital manager, delivering these analytics to marketers. I realised, okay, if I don't understand them anymore, how will someone who looks at this data for maybe half an hour a month understand it?

What I meant in that post is that by reducing the KPIs or outcomes you look at – drastically – you save time to actually do something with the data. Because the more data you gather, the more time you need to analyse it, obviously.

And sometimes – maybe I'll mention one example; bounce rate or average time on site. In some contexts it can be helpful, but on an average website, say you find that the average visit is ten seconds. Ten seconds of viewing could mean either your site is so good that people find what they need quickly and leave after ten seconds (which is a perfect user experience), or it could mean people come, try to find something, can't find it, and leave after ten seconds in frustration. In both cases, you have a 10-second visit. What does that tell you? Nothing by itself.

So my point is, focus on the KPIs that actually tell you something actionable, and not on metrics that require a team of twenty to interpret. Otherwise, you'll have analysis paralysis.

Mehrnaz: Yes, it does make sense! The more data you have, the more overwhelming it becomes. I always say, ask "So what?" – like, why am I collecting this data, and so what does it tell me? The difficulty is drawing meaning and insight from the data when there's too much of it.

Emerging Digital Trends in Pharma

Mehrnaz: Nico, do you see any emerging digital trends that you believe will have a big impact on pharma in the next few years?

Nico: Yes, there are plenty. I'll just mention the obvious one: AI. I’ll let the AI experts elaborate on all the advancements, but clearly AI is a big transformative and disruptive force.

Beyond that, something I see coming in the future – especially when I compare to other countries – is social media playing a larger role. Both in terms of healthcare professionals themselves having a voice. We will see a lot more "medfluencers," if you will – physicians sharing their thoughts and explaining aspects of diseases online - because that's where people are listening and have time to listen.

I don't really want to use the word "influencer" for pharma because "influencing" sounds a bit negative or manipulative. Let's say digital opinion leaders or thought leaders. I think these voices on LinkedIn will become more frequent.

As of now, only about 1% of LinkedIn users ever share content. But if I look at countries where social media usage is more widespread – like Spain, Brazil, and so on – people are much more active on social. I've followed this trend for a few years and I can see that in Germany and Switzerland now, people are starting to post more frequently.

My prediction is in three to five years we will see many more pharma colleagues and peers posting and sharing content – obviously beyond product promotion, because you can't share product specifics publicly – but sharing thoughts on healthcare economics, patient care, and so on. I think a lot more people will be sharing and debating these things on social platforms.

Mehrnaz: I agree. That's a new trend. I actually spoke to Dr. Azam, who is a doctor and a content creator – he has 400,000 followers and he's just started his journey. He's educating patients and using the platform to inform people. Numbers speak, if 400,000 people are following him, clearly what he's sharing is seen as valuable. People gravitate towards that because maybe social platforms are more entertaining. You pointed out earlier that pharma content is not exactly entertaining, but people might be seeking some entertainment value in how information is delivered. It is definitely a growing trend.

Nico: They call it "edutainment" – a mix between education and entertainment. And also, now that you mention numbers: one big bias we all have is to think it's just a linear progression – that as younger generations replace older ones, suddenly everyone will be using social media. But in reality, the fastest growing segment on social media is actually older generations. I looked at some numbers for Germany from last year: the people between fifty and sixty-five were the segment where social media usage grew the most, relatively speaking. It was over 10% growth in active usage for that group. We think widespread social media adoption is far in the future, but it's going to become reality very soon.

Reflections on The Omni Advantage Book

Mehrnaz: So, Nico, what’s your favourite part of the book, or a key message that stood out to you?

Nico: A chapter that comes to mind off the top of my head is the one with Florent (one of the experts you interviewed). He said we think that physicians remember our names, our brands, the nice slide decks we send – and so on – while in reality what they care about is their patients and what we're offering to help those patients.

Sometimes we marketers think our communications are far more important than they actually are. The value we deliver – and this is stated in literally every pharma company's slide decks – is only realised if we help physicians treat their patients in an optimal way. That message really stuck with me from that chapter.

In general, I really like the book because you are close enough to the industry to know all the details and nuances, but you still can be brutally honest with your opinion. I think we need that. The mirror you mentioned earlier – it really was like holding up a mirror in front of our faces. You read it and feel, "Yeah, actually that's true, we should change that."

Mehrnaz: Thank you so much for your feedback. I want to share a little announcement: When I wrote and published the book, AI and social media weren't as prominent as they are now. Somebody said to me last year, "Mehrnaz, it would be really good for you to add a chapter about AI." So, I decided that for 2025 I'm going to publish a second edition. I'm adding a chapter on AI – in fact I've finished writing it and I'm waiting for contributions from a couple of thought leaders – and I'm writing a chapter on social media. I've invited Nico to contribute to that chapter, so watch this space!

Conclusion

I think at the end of the day, we all talk about omnichannel, but what we really need is not omnichannel per se, what we want is meaningful engagement with healthcare professionals. Engagement is not just coverage and frequency; it's about listening, understanding, and adding real value that addresses their pain points. That's how we can become truly their trusted advisors whom they actually want to listen to.

I believe we all have the power to do something much bigger than ourselves. If we break down the internal silos between Sales, Marketing and Medical, and focus on people – empower them, invest in their growth, unlock their true potential – together we can create a healthier world.

If you would like to purchase a copy of The Omni Advantage, it is available as a paperback or audiobook.