Early wakeup call today as we had to be at Kelley for a 7 a.m. departure. A lot of us definitely used the hour-long bus ride up to Indy to catch a few more Z’s.
Eli Lilly didn’t make us sign a confidentiality agreement, but they did have us pass through a metal detector. That must be interesting for the doctors that come on-site with all of their equipment.
We had three great presentations from very senior marketers at Lilly. They talked about the changes in the pharma industry once direct-to-consumer ads were approved by the government circa 1998.
Kelley grad Michelle DeRidder (2008) hosted us – and talked about why she chose Lilly over a CPG. Namely, the ability to have a hand in the development and marketing of life-saving medicine.
It gets very interesting in the pharma world, because you can’t just market to the consumer. You have to get the doctor involved. And, there’s also the payer to consider (e.g., insurance company) as well as keeping the FDA happy.
So, there are many heads to a marketing campaign at Eli Lilly.
To tie it all together, we talked about the Cialis launch almost 10 years ago. Cialis is the erectile dysfunction drug that Lilly hoped would, and successfully did, overtake Viagra.
This is a family blog, so I’ll leave it to you to make up your own jokes. Ok, just one or two…….
Through the “4-hour erection” jokes and questions about the tubs they use in their commercials, we learned how carefully they segmented their potential customers and which benefits they leveraged when going after Viagra’s market share.
The folks at Lilly were really sincere and demonstrated their desire to improve the quality of peoples’ lives. The senior marketers I mentioned even sat down with us during our lunch and got to know us.
All in all, a great time.
