Marketing
MARKETING AFRICA
Marketing
Kenyanito Baraka
Dear Pharma Brand Manager, Who Are You, When No One Is Watching?
An Open Letter Dear Brand Manager,
Pharmaceutical brands are not built by companies. They are built by people, working inside companies, and the brand only ever ends up as good as the person running it. Not your résumé. Not your training. Not the university you attended or the certification hanging in your office. You, under pressure, off-script, unsupervised, three borders away from anyone who could actually check what you ' re really like when the campaign starts to wobble, or when a medical rep calls to say a prescriber has raised a question about your product that isn ' t in the approved messaging deck.
So before the next campaign brief, before the next market gets circled on a map, run the audit. Not the one in your performance review, which mostly measures whether you hit a number you set under the supervision of your boss. Measure the real numbers that matter for your career; the Big Five personality model, remembered by the acronym OCEAN: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism. It is, by a wide margin, the most rigorously validated personality framework available, built inductively from decades of independent research. A landmark 1991 meta-analysis covering more than a hundred studies and tens of thousands of working adults
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found that Conscientiousness alone predicts job performance consistently across nearly every field measured; a finding replicated since across more than 150 countries. That is not a horoscope, and it is not a personality quiz you fill out between meetings for entertainment. That is the closest thing to a measured fact about yourself that currently exists. Go through it trait by trait, slowly, and answer honestly; not the answer that makes you look good in the mirror, the answer your sales team would give if you asked them instead.
Openness is how readily a person seeks out new ideas, ambiguity, and unfamiliar territory, versus how strongly they prefer the proven, the familiar, and the already-approved. Can you get yourself to the field and actually listen to a pharmacist, to a patient, to the person handing your product across a counter when your CEO never told you to go? High Openness is what makes you curious enough to leave the dashboard and go find out what ' s actually happening at the shelf, instead of assuming the market research from eighteen months ago still describes today. Sometimes, pharma brand management has a specific way of hiding from this question: it is easy to spend an entire quarter inside HCP engagement plans, KOL advisory boards, and adherence-program dashboards, and never once stand at a pharmacy counter watching how a patient actually decides between your brand and the generic sitting next to it at a third of the price. Low Openness, unmanaged, is what lets a brand manager sit comfortably in a meeting room for years, mistaking " the way we ' ve always run this campaign " for a strategy, defending a launch plan long after the market it was built for has quietly moved on. The question isn ' t whether you ' re capable of curiosity in the abstract. It ' s whether you ' ve actually used it recently, on something nobody required you to check, in a market you weren ' t scheduled to visit.
Conscientiousness is a person ' s self-discipline, order, and follow-through; the degree to which they do what they said they would do, on the timeline they said they ' d do it, whether or not anyone is checking. Did you say the campaign would launch in March, and is it actually launching in March, not " essentially ready," not " just waiting on one more sign-off," but actually live, on the date you committed to, in front of the people who were told to expect it? Order is the quieter half of this trait and the one brand managers underrate most: is your medical-legal-regulatory documentation actually filed the way it ' s supposed to be, every time, in every market, or only in the market someone happens to be auditing this quarter? Self-discipline is what determines whether you do the unglamorous follow-through; chasing the missing signature, confirming the approved product