How Pharma Should Rethink and Mature Its Omnichannel Engagement  

Most industries discovered omnichannel customer engagement before pharma ever considered dipping a toe in it. Retail giants like Nike, Apple, and Sephora started shaping the playbook in the early 2000s.  

Pharma arrived much later to the party, but with a completely different level of responsibility. The industry, which influences patient outcomes, had to reinvent the omnichannel rules written by telecom and retail. 

On this episode of Pharma Talks, host Nataliya Andreychuk sat down with Yacin Marzouki, one of the earliest leaders who brought omnichannel to life in Japan, EMEA, and South America. He’s launched HCP portals that soared. And yes, a few that didn’t. But he’s refreshingly honest about why. 

One of the key messages of this episode: Pharma doesn’t need more channels or more tech. It needs alignment and proper understanding of their audience and markets. 

Blind Spots that Destroy Omnichannel Strategies

When Nataliya asked about the biggest blind spots, Yacin emphasized that despite commonly held beliefs it is not the technology problem. It is a fragmentation problem.

In retail, omnichannel is usually owned by one function. One team runs the tech stack, owns CRM, creates content, executes campaigns, reads insights, and closes the loop. 

Pharma splits all of this across several teams. Marketing creates content but doesn’t own the tech stack. Omnichannel teams run the stack but don’t create the content. Analytics works in a separate lane. Medical approves content but isn’t aligned on segmentation goals. This leads to data silos that make personalization more challenging. Another blind spot is even more fundamental. Yacin opined:

In life sciences, we need to get clear on who the actual customer is. We obsess over what HCPs supposedly want. But HCPs don’t make decisions in a vacuum. They manage institutional pressures, payer rules, and patient anxieties. If we don’t equip them with the information they need to convince patients, our content delivers zero real value.

And finally, teams collect data and insights but interpret it separately and rarely consolidate it into one narrative. This way, marketers have a hard time figuring out what the next best action is.  

Faster Horses or Cars Problem

Many brands today claim to be customer-centric. But in reality, they simply ask what their audience wants without truly empathizing with them. 

Yacin thinks we need to stop asking HCPs what they need. This data won’t necessarily show you the best way forward. That question is the equivalent of asking people in 1900 if they want a faster horse, instead of seeing their pain points and giving them a car. 

So, here are the questions to ask: 

• Where do they actually access information today? 

• What problems are they facing with patients? 

• What keywords are they searching? 

• What questions do patients keep asking them? 

It’s not only about convincing HCPs. It’s also about helping HCPs convince patients, because they are the main decision-makers. 

What a Real Maturity Model Looks Like

The omnichannel strategy has a PR problem. People think about the final stage only: the right message, right time, right channel. But that is not a strategy. That’s the outcome. 

Here’s the omnichannel maturity stages Yacin points out: 

1. Face-to-face only 

2. Basic activation with a few extra channels 

3. Multichannel 

4. Omnichannel 

5. Advanced / predictive omnichannel 

Multichannel approach gets a bad reputation, but in reality, it can work beautifully when executed the right way. Nataliya’s own approach is a great example. She built audience trust across channels over time, then added a podcast when the foundation already existed. Yacin added:

The podcast isn’t fully integrated into your ecosystem, and you can’t track whether Dr. Anna watched it for 30 minutes. But that’s completely OK. It still delivers value. And when you consistently deliver value, you earn the right for deeper interactions later.

He also reminded us that decisions are never the result of one magic channel. 

I’m sure there were multiple “aha moments” before you, Nataliya, bought your glasses. HCP decisions work the same way.

Why Omnichannel Becomes Expensive

As your omnichannel maturity grows, your tech stack and your content plan become more expensive. Audience segmentation only creates value when you actually produce content for each segment.  

If you have five personas and create one email, you’ve created zero personalization. If you create five emails, engagement goes up but so do costs and approval cycles. Medical teams often don’t have the capacity to approve all that content, which is why this work must be planned together. Otherwise, you end up creating five emails and approving only one.

And even when content gets approved, 77% of content never reaches HCPs. Not because it’s bad, but because reps don’t feel comfortable presenting it. If they don’t understand the persona it’s built for, they default to the same slide deck every time.

Nataliya added another reason:

Segmentation is often too generic. If the content doesn’t match the conversation, it never gets used.

Agencies don’t have access to HCP-level data, so their personalization can be surface-level. Many pharma companies are now building digital personas to solve this gap. But again, the value depends on the market. 

In Spain, where HCP engagement is regular and digital, building personas is realistic. In Germany, where reps see HCPs once or twice a year and email open rates are lower, personalization relies on assumptions.  

Hot or Not: The Rapid-Fire Round

Nataliya challenged Yacin with quick takes. Here’s where he landed. 

• More platforms equal better omnichannel: Not 

• AI will outperform humans in segmentation by 2026: Hot, only if we create real value afterward 

• Rep-triggered engagement will beat mass email: Hot 

• Omnichannel engagement starts with content, not data: Hot 

• HCPs want personalization, not promotion: Very hot 

• Global should own strategy, local should execute: Lukewarm 

• The future is fewer but smarter channels: Hot 

• PDFs will disappear by 2027: “No chance. There are still fax machines in Germany,” Yacin jokes. 

• Omnichannel will merge with medcomms and patient engagement by 2030: Hot 

• The next frontier is emotional tech, empathy, and trust: Hot 

Getting Omnichannel Engagement Right

What many brands still overlook is that you can’t fix omnichannel with technology alone. You need teams to share data continuously, test and improve, and compare those findings with insights.

And you need to remember that your “customers” are not only HCPs. Once you know who they are, the next step is asking better questions. Questions that help you empathize with them rather than push your own agenda. This is how you stop treating omnichannel as a department and start treating it as an ecosystem.

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