Exploring Digital Transformation in the Pharmaceutical Industry with Stan Karwowsky

00:00 - Danny (Host)

Welcome to Digital Customer Experience podcast by Kiosk. I'm Daniel Fall and I'm thrilled to bring you stories, insights and expert opinions from the ever-evolving world of digital customer experience. Today, we have an excellent guest. We're joined by Stan Karbowsky, a pharma digital marketing consultant and strategist with 18 years of impressive experience. Stan has led global initiatives, delivering 100 plus marketing campaigns and working at over 50 marketing agencies. Now he runs his own consulting business, helping pharma companies navigate the digital landscape. Stan isn't just a marketing crew. He's also a PhD in applied linguistics. And, guess what? He's a personal development enthusiast and a nature lover. Stan, we are thrilled to have you here to share your journey and insights. Welcome.

00:51 - Stan Karwowski (Host)

Hello Daniel, thank you for having me. I'm really glad to join your video, your podcast, perfect.

00:56 - Danny (Host)

Thank you so much, Stan. I really love the experiences and the differences and the varieties that you have in your profession. But I want to know Stan a little bit more outside of the consulting realm. Who is Stan outside of the marketing and consulting realm?

01:11 - Stan Karwowski (Host)

Well, the things you may not know about me, which are maybe interesting to some of you, is that I love nature, as you say, and I love collecting mushrooms. That's a very peculiar hobby, but I really adore that. And now I must say that in the past actually before I start, before I became a digital marketer I wanted to become a scientist. I did the PhD in applied linguistics, as you say, and even worked at the university for quite a few years, but then I realized that maybe academics is not the thing for me. Moving forward, it's more that entrepreneurial spirit that woke up and said, hey, you need to work with people, right, you need to connect, you need to build something, create things. And then that is how I went into business. And then, because business is such a wide thing and it has so many domains to me, digital marketing and strategies are the things that talk to me the most and that's why I focused on them and that's why I'm here today.

02:11 - Danny (Host)

Nice and I kind of feel. Also, you've laid foundation by doing PhD in linguistics, because you love working with people from different countries, so why linguistics?

02:23 - Stan Karwowski (Host)

Well, I always love to investigate things and understand how things work, and language is a phenomenon. It's a super complex system, probably one of the most complex you can imagine, and then, because I was able to, I had the chance to connect it with neuroscience as well and look at language from, like you know, neurobiology perspective and how our brain acts and behaves when we produce language, when we consume, etc. Then that was exceptionally interesting to me because, you know, I learned a lot about myself, about others and how people basically function. So that is why I went into linguistics and I need to say, danny, it's still in me, yeah.

03:03 - Danny (Host)

I'm a little bit curious, because you are into or you have a PhD in linguistics. How many languages do you speak?

03:10 - Stan Karwowski (Host)

I speak three languages fluently and one on a communicative level.

03:16 - Danny (Host)

Nice and because we are on the same path now. Language people, because you work with people from different marketing agencies. So who is the most fun to work with? When I mean who? People from which countries are most fun to work with? People from which countries are really creative? People from which countries are like you know something that you don't expect from them. Can you give us a little bit of your experience with working with people?

03:42 - Stan Karwowski (Host)

Danny, I love the question. I really love the question. I did indeed work with multiple representatives of multiple countries and every country and every person has their own kind of mindset, spirit, if you like, mentality, experience and how they react to things, how they communicate and how they emotionally even interact with you and, for example, I've always liked working with colleagues from Spain or Italy because they're very emotional, they're very open, transparent, like you know. It's really fun, it's super fun. So, as you said, I would say those guys are like tremendous in that aspect not only them, but that's very outstanding.

04:27

Then you mentioned creativity and I noticed that people I've worked with that come from Turkey were extremely creative. Those guys always found solutions to things that were thought that are not solvable, for example, but they always did something interesting, like have different type of kind of problem solving, etc. So that was really interesting. I think the biggest surprise to me throughout my career was working with people from the Nordics and Norway, sweden, denmark and Finland, because they are very different from in terms of how they can interact with others. They're more calm, but they're super professional and there are people that you can count on. Whatever they say, they're gonna do that, so we can feel extremely confident and comfortable that whatever you do with them, it's gonna end up with some sort of a success. It's only a matter whether it's smaller or bigger, so I really adore working with them from that comfort perspective.

05:29 - Danny (Host)

I need to say it's amazing how your experience of working with different countries have brought this perspective of people. But have you ever had in one room people from Spain and Italy, people from Turkey and people from the Nordic? Have you had a chance to have people of these different personalities or cultures in one place?

05:50 - Stan Karwowski (Host)

Wow, yes, absolutely. And you probably know that phenomenon called town halls, when you work for big customers and you've got that town hall and suddenly you have like 50, 100 people arriving from different countries and because I worked for global units, primarily in my experience then those situations happened a lot and what I learned is that the dynamics of every person is totally different and you need to be able to prepare in advance the whole flow of that meeting, basically, and take into account that every of those people have to have some kind of value specific for them. So that's very, that's very demanding. But once you've got that flow, once you get into that and you basically run the whole show, then that diversity coming from their different mindset, different ways of behaving is actually building like an extremely valuable experience. So I really like those situations, Dani.

06:50 - Danny (Host)

And I can see that you have to shift your or transform your mind according to the needs and the personalities of the people in the room, which takes me to the next question, which is about transformation, digital transformation. So what are the three things to avoid during digital transformation in pharmaceutical industries?

07:13 - Stan Karwowski (Host)

That is a very tricky question, dani, but also one that is very close to my heart, because I went through multiple transformation processes in pharma and not only, and the thing I would start with, the top thing I would start thing is avoid focusing on updating technology. Right, I'm not saying technology is bad, it's really good, it's a perfect activator of a change. But I've seen too many times people focused on updating technology, extending, adding some fancy things you know, but without processes, without capabilities of people that work with that technology, technology doesn't work. It's like you have a Ferrari and you don't have a driver and you've never been to a racetrack.

07:56 - Danny (Host)

Right it can't work.

07:58 - Stan Karwowski (Host)

It just can't work, and I've seen that too many times. Second thing is that do not expect that people wait for your transformation, for the change that comes with the transformation. Again, I saw that so many times that, let's say, a global unit deploying that transformation throughout all the local business units think that those guys are actually waiting for that, but the reality is that they are focused on their daily work, especially commercial part of it, right, and they do not have any time blocked for doing more of the things, right. So before you think that anybody can or is going to be kind of waiting or working on what you deliver, you have to be sure that people, you have their buying and people are ready, they know how to do that. They are with you, basically.

08:48

And the last thing I would say is that too many times I've seen leaving adoption element to the very end of the project, right.

08:56

So you've got initially people collect requirements, then designers create some kind of wireframes and everything.

09:05

Then you've got production guys developing things for you and then everything goes into production and it looks so great. And then the day when you hear the go live, the ring bells, and then the day after you look into how people react and sometimes you see nothing right, because people are like, oh great, but hey, why didn't you come to us earlier? Why didn't we have a plan? How are we going to use that transformation and how it actually talks to our plans that we already have right, because we're not waiting for anything. We have operational plans, we have strategic plans and all those elements what you come to us with, has to be embedded into that right. We will not do that job for you because we don't know what you're delivering right that will suit you. So I would say the last thing don't wait with the adoption element for the end. Do it or start it even before the start of the project. Take the buying and understand how people operate, how they plan and how you can embed what you're going to deliver, that value, into their daily work.

10:07 - Danny (Host)

Makes sense, makes sense and it's also very nicely put down into three different categories so people can understand how to fix the errors, or three things to avoid during digital transformation.

10:19 - Stan Karwowski (Host)

Yeah, absolutely. And then can I tell you one short story about adoption.

10:26 - Danny (Host)

Yes.

10:26 - Stan Karwowski (Host)

It'll take like 30 seconds. One of my customers. There was a situation where they jumped onto transformational journey and they had really nice budgets, so they decided to build several apps some for HDP, some for patients and then everything went well. The apps were live and after a while the sponsor came and said hey guys, can you tell me how many logins we have to our apps? And then the guys from analytics went into the stats and they checked that one of the apps meant for HCPs had zero logins and the sponsor went like, why zero logins? It's impossible. They checked the logs and everything right and apparently even the product owner didn't log in to the app. That's a perfect example of you can't wait with adoption. You have to think about it in advance.

11:20 - Danny (Host)

That's a good story for people to realize that you know, build the product, everyone will come by. Oh, you have to adopt early. So very well said. So the next question that I have is actually about the pharmaceutical industry, Because pharmaceutical industry innovation is not new. Pharmaceutical industry is constantly innovating, constantly growing with regards to evolving with technologies. But how has digital marketing evolved in pharmaceutical industry?

11:50 - Stan Karwowski (Host)

Wow, very good question, danny, again, and a very serious one this time. I'm not feeling like I want to laugh a lot and I would say I would maybe divide that sort of evolution into three phases. The first one would be digital basics. Second one would be digital transformation, the thing we talked about. And the last one, the one we're in currently, I would call, maybe, digital acceleration.

12:19

So, when it comes to digital basics, those were the times where sales representatives in pharma and MSLs went to HCPs with PDF presentations and then e-detail presentations. So e-detailers brought that element of interactivity and Era continues until now, those e-detailers. I don't know if you know, but I read a report from IQ, I guess, where it said that 60% of marketing investments go into developing e-detailers. Right, even now, even today. So that era continues until today. But from technology perspective or advancement perspective, I would call it digital basics because it's super basic.

13:05

Then Big pharma companies were the first one to say, hey, we want to have more, we now want to be very digital, we want to interact with our 8cps through digital channels. And that was there was that huge movement in the industry where giant suddenly created huge programs, invited hundreds of different experts and Start in delivering digital transformation. That meant that they came with an with, with an idea of Implementing the whole digital ecosystems into every local business affiliate right. That ecosystem consisted of, or consists of, crm, marketing, automation, websites, analytics, webinars, emailing systems Practically everything and and customer databases, which is probably one of the most important ones.

13:51

And that era, or that face I have associations with it, like it's an era of a bit of a failure or disappointment disappointment, I would say. Unfortunately. What I noticed and what what we faced in the industry, is that those programs were delivered in a very water Waterfall type manner from project management perspective, so the program lasted for a year or longer and before we arrived at the moment where we could deploy things, the situation in the market has changed and the adoption element wasn't ready, so the success of those transformations was very limited, I would say, and that brought us to another phase, which I would call digital acceleration. And these days, just open LinkedIn and there's going to be a question to you, danny what is the topic that is currently the most popular from your perspective when it comes to pharma, technology-wise? What is it?

14:52 - Danny (Host)

I'm assuming AI. I'm not sure, but AI.

14:55 - Stan Karwowski (Host)

Yeah, exactly, I mean, every day I open LinkedIn, at least one post talks about AI, and it's great. But on the other hand, I see that this is very, very high level and I very rarely see that providers of those AI solutions have very specific micro use cases that can be implemented in a pharma company. We need to remember that this is an industry where regulations are super strict, first of all, where the ways of working is still quite traditional, I must say so you can't just come and say, hey, I've got a fancy tool, now, if you implement it, something will change. That never happens. But so today we've got AI, we've got personalization, we've got omnichannel, and I already expected that omnichannel soon will evolve into something else. It came from multichannel into omnichannel, and now let's see what's going to be the next buzzword if I can say that way.

15:58

And again, I think this is an phase where I see a bit of a digital fatigue, maybe, and maybe a bit of disappointment still, because I'm not finding it that many of pharma companies are actually practically having any benefits of adding new technologies like AI or personalization, or that they are even able to implement proper personalization. I see that there are companies that are struggling with this. There are companies that are making bold moves and they're going in the right direction, but it's a journey. So I would say digital acceleration is something we're in now. It's going to evolve and let's see where we go with this, where we end up.

16:44 - Danny (Host)

Yeah. One question or big doubt that I have is you said omnichannel, you said AI, you said many digital tools. They are constantly evolving, they are constantly being introduced into the pharmaceutical industry, industry, and you said they necessarily need not work In order for them to work. What needs to be done? Well, whoa.

17:09 - Stan Karwowski (Host)

Very nice, danny, to answer your question. Can I give you an analogy, please? Yeah, I did that because it's a very the answer, I think, is very complex and that analogy, I hope, is going to be giving us a segue into very simple and quick understanding of how it can be approached. So imagine you have a grand orchestra. Let's call it pharma music, right? Grand orchestra. In that orchestra you've got many musicians some play violin, others cello, percussion flutes and all that stuff. Right?

17:42

I'm not a musician, I can't give you any more instrument names, but there are many more than that and you've got that conductor, an orchestrator, that is trying to look into everybody in person and then the whole thing together, right? So now every musician has to have an instrument, they have to have notes right and they have to be able to play their instrument. Right Now, imagine we have that situation that the concert starts right, everybody plays, An orchestrator just gives the rhythm and everything and shows what they need to do, and if everybody works together, they play music, the audience listens, they come closer to the orchestra in that metaphorical sense, right? They? You feel the pool. Now, danny, what happens if at least one of the musicians doesn't play the same notes, I have different notes or their instrument is out of tune. What happens? What do you think?

18:50 - Danny (Host)

I think from music it turns into noise.

18:53 - Stan Karwowski (Host)

It turns into noise. I love your answer. I love your answer and I think that's what unfortunately quite often happens in pharma companies when it comes to omnichannel implementation. Because those musicians, to me, stand for individual departments, right, medical affairs, commercial department, marketing, digital, even IT, pharma, co-villagens, compliance. They all need to, in a way, play together the same song, the same notes, and to me, those notes are content, right, it's content. If they have the same content, they go to the customer with the same content, then the customer knows, you know, it's very, it's simple and it's easy and it's consistent, consistent as a keyword. I would say here yeah. Now also, if they know how to play, meaning that they have capabilities right, then the experience of the customer is a lot better. If they didn't know that, and also if they have the right instrument and the instrument is in tune right, that, to me, is an analogy to all those digital tools we have marketing automation, crms and websites and everything right. If those instruments are in tune right, then again customer experience is a lot better, right, yeah.

20:07

So to me, in order for Omnichannel to work, you have to first of all align everybody, and that's probably the biggest, the most difficult, yet the most important element of Omnichannel implementation, I would say. Then I would say, when you have that alignment, you need to think about how to pull customers into your experience that you want to deliver, right? Forget about pushing things to customers like you know, like another email webinars on product-related information, right? I'm not sure that that ACPs are interested in that. I actually read a report recently where it said that when you have a new treatment, acps are interested in three things the most. The first one is clinical data on efficacy. Then you have clinical data on safety and then comparison of that treatment method with current treatment methods, not product to product, it's not a head-to-head comparison, but treatment options. Right.

21:11

And what pharma companies focus on? They focus on comparing their product with another product, right? They focus on providing expert's opinion, and expert's opinion in that report came tens only. Can you imagine it's only tens. Peer opinion came only 12, right. And again, that's what pharma companies think is super important. So they're trying to bring together ACPs so that they can exchange, and all those elements are important.

21:38

But if you don't listen well enough to the customer, then you're delivering things that maybe do not matter the most for them, right? And I guess maybe in pharma we have to think a lot more about pull, a lot more about inbound compared to outbound and push, and the last element I would say is about measuring your success and then optimizing. I see a lot of vanity, so-called vanity measures that pharmas focus on, for example, impressions from banners or displays, right. That don't really talk about customer satisfaction, right. They don't talk about how customer converts, right.

22:26

So I would say that focus on what you want to measure and think about very creative way of connecting patient experience with HCPS experience and measure through that what I mean by that. There's an interesting KPI I've heard of recently which I really love, and it's called number of customer, number of patients cured, right. So if you measure success of your product through how many patients have been cured with your product and then backwards, from that you can count prescriptions and from prescriptions you can count all the interactions you've done to achieve that right, you've got a perfect way to measure the success of your product launch, right, and you're very close to the mission of the company. You're very close to the patient centricity aspect, which should be the core of it.

23:20 - Danny (Host)

Thank you for breaking it down really well, because I actually went into a musical orchestra into Austria by your story. I was there and then when I came out I was wearing a lab coat as a pharmaceutical expert, because the analogy that you gave with music and connecting that to how people gauge the need of a platform or need of a service or need of a specific channel, comes down to the result produced. So that was beautifully explained. Thank you very much, tan, for that. I'm really happy you liked it. So we're coming pretty much close to the end of our podcast, but there's a couple of things that I want to ask you before we wind up. So how crucial is change management in the context of digital transformation within pharmaceutical industry?

24:11 - Stan Karwowski (Host)

Well, that's a killer question, Danny. You know that. Can I give you a short story? Yes, sorry.

24:20

So I in the past I worked for a customer. I was a big farmer, let's call it pharma X and then pharma X decided to jump on a digital transformation journey. They had secured budgets, they had brilliant brains brought to the program. Everything went well. I was actually one of the guys that was globally leading implementation of the transformation in local business units and I did that for probably around 20 different local business units across the whole globe. I was really proud of doing that. We're delivering the whole digital ecosystem processes, trainings and everything. So it was a brilliant experience.

25:04

I was working with multiple countries all those meetings where you have people from I don't know four Nordic countries or everybody together, like Spain, italy, france and the UK those mixes. I really love those interactions and that diversity. And then I was offered an opportunity to join one of the local business units and lead their digital marketing efforts, manage their digital marketing efforts. So I first delivered to them the whole solution, the whole transformation, as a delivery lead so let's call it. And then I was supposed to use that. The whole value that I brought to them was supposed to be used basically in practice. And then how surprised I was when I realized that, first of all, nobody was really waiting for that. As I said before, nobody was like anticipating yeah, it's coming. So now we're gonna change the ways of working. Right, everybody continued their ways of working. How surprised I was that the trainings delivered were not sufficient, they weren't practical enough, that the process we had were too high level and basically that it didn't land. So what I had to do is spend several months drafting processes for emailing, for how to CRM needs to be used, market automation, how to build analytical reports for campaigns and all that stuff. I had to spend months literally on working with representatives of commercial unit, of marketing, of IT, medical, and explain them the value again, basically Bring them to the table, offer some small like quick pilots where we could generate the value in a very efficient manner without too much effort and basically start the whole journey again.

27:00

So my lessons learned from that experience was that maybe not necessarily have we thought about change management enough, and without that the whole work didn't land practically. So now I know that before you do anything, first of all go to the people you wanna work with and deliver something. Ask them what you need, what they need Now, what are their obstacles and what are the opportunities we can embark on, and only then start designing something that really works for them. Those global implementations where you have the same thing for everybody, one size fits all. They don't necessarily work right, because everybody's different, even from mindset perspective, right?

27:43

So with that story in mind, danny, I would say that change management is of paramount importance. I would say that's the first thing you need to think about when delivering a transformation, something to start with, and something that I mean you need to be aware that people should be at the forefront of your thinking, their ideas, their challenges, their opportunities, everything. When you have them on the board, then you can do whatever you like. If you don't have them, maybe you need to forget about the success, but it is possible, right? It's just a reverse in a bit, the order of actions.

28:22 - Danny (Host)

Yeah, and thank you for insisting on the importance of the change management. Thank you so much, Stan. It was a pleasure to have you.

28:31 - Stan Karwowski (Host)

Thank you so much, and likewise I really enjoyed the podcast.

28:36 - Danny (Host)

Thank you and to our viewers if you enjoyed today's podcast, remember to like, share and subscribe for more in-depth discussions of digital customer experience. Please drop us in the comment below with your thoughts or any questions that you might have for Stan or a future guest. Until next time, stay curious and keep in a baby.

https://www.giosg.com/podcast

Your feedback matters to us, so feel free to leave your comments and suggestions. If you enjoyed this episode you enjoyed, please subscribe episode, to our podcast and share it consider leaving us a review with your network. Stay tuned by subscribing to our podcast. 

Remember for more interesting conversations on digital, your feedback helps us deliver the content you transform, customer service, and want to hear. Stay tuned leadership. Until next time!