What if your global HCP campaign isn’t landing because of your targeting, creative, or budget, but your planning mindset?
In the high-stakes world of pharmaceutical marketing, campaigns can burn through millions before anyone realizes they’re off track. And more often than not, the problem isn’t visibility—it’s relevance. It’s the silent killer of even the most ambitious global plans: a disconnect between global strategy and local execution.
This post kicks off the Endemic Planning Series—a deep dive into what it really means to build scalable global strategies that work locally, with a strong bias toward marketing campaign execution, because that’s where I’ve spent the majority of my career. While we’ll often focus on communications, media, and engagement, endemic planning goes beyond media. It’s a way of thinking that should influence how problems are defined, how teams are structured, and how solutions are co-created from the start.
Are you curious about the differences in different markets?
The Local Disconnect: A Personal Perspective
Having spent over two decades launching and scaling digital campaigns for clients of all sizes and industries, the last 10 years I have focused on pharmaceutical companies around the world. I’ve seen the same scenario unfold again and again: global teams come armed with budget, strategy, and best intentions—yet the execution at the local level becomes fragmented, delayed, or derailed. Bear in mind, I have also seen really strong approaches… almost transformational !-)
Often, the issue isn’t technical or creative. It’s organizational. It’s strategic misalignment. In theory, every company has processes to support local adaptation. But in practice, a global team might develop a solution and impose it downstream, assuming alignment simply because funding exists. Local teams, facing their own priorities, compliance realities, and HCP insights, often don’t see the relevance or urgency. And so, the initiative either stalls or launches without meaningful impact.
In other cases, global teams try to be more inclusive by involving affiliates in the execution phase. While this is a step in the right direction, it often comes too late. When local stakeholders are brought in only to validate or adapt an already-developed concept, they feel more like recipients than co-creators. This delays buy-in and, in some cases, shifts enthusiasm into skepticism.
A Third Way: Collaborative Co-Creation from Day One
In my experience, the most successful cross-market initiatives don’t start with a solution—they start with a shared problem definition. Global teams that involve affiliates from the very beginning, including the early framing of challenges and goals, create not only better solutions but stronger momentum. This approach moves endemic thinking upstream: the local market is not just where we execute, it’s where we begin.
And this matters, especially in pharma, where a digital asset like a website or email campaign doesn’t live in a single silo. A campaign will touch privacy compliance, local IT infrastructure, scientific communication standards, creative expectations, and more. The budget holder might be Medical Affairs, but success depends on collaboration across functions and borders.
Endemic Planning Isn’t Just About Channels
So what does all of this have to do with endemic planning? Everything.
If endemic planning is about placing the right message in the right context, then context needs to be defined not only by HCP behavior, but by the organizational, cultural, and compliance framework in which that message is delivered. The most effective plan isn’t the one that reaches the most eyeballs; it’s the one that lands with relevance.
Different countries have different rules, but they also have different habits. In some markets, HCPs rely on subscription newsletters or private forums. In others, they prefer podcasts or live symposia. Ignoring this nuance in favor of a one-size-fits-all global rollout is a recipe for wasted budget and missed opportunity.
Let’s Talk About It
Over the coming weeks, I’ll be unpacking best practices, spotlighting successful case studies, and offering practical tools to help you bring a locally-relevant mindset into every phase of your planning.
And I’d love to hear from you. How does your organization bridge the global-local divide? What has worked—and what hasn’t?
Endemic planning isn’t a tactic. It’s a mindset. And it starts long before media gets planned.
Stay tuned.
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