Interview with Cicek Aydin, Marketing Director, EMD Serono, Inc.
The NEXT Pharma Summit 2024 will run from 22-23 October, at the Hotel Savoyen, Vienna. The event will showcase ideas on unlocking pharma’s authentic voice through meaningful customer experience, engagement and applied AI.
Cicek Aydin, Marketing Director at EMD Serono, Inc will participate in a panel discussion entitled “Enhancing Customer Experience, from Strategy to Tactics” on the first day of the event.
SciencePOD had the opportunity to speak with Cicek in advance of the event.
A good strategy means figuring out your customers’ journey, whether it's patients, caregivers or physicians.
Could you tell us about your role at EMD Serono?
I’m the director of marketing for the HIV endocrinology division. I’m responsible for a 27-year plus old legacy HIV treatment product. I truly enjoy my job and my team and there’s still so many opportunities to grow the brand so it is very exciting.
Although our product is relatively old, we are generating real world evidence data. We’re looking at our clinical trial data and looking into new data cuts and analysis to help keep the information on brand interesting and for our customers to learn more about our brand.
What are you planning to talk about in your NEXT Pharma Vienna session?
I think it’s important to start with the strategy before going into the tactics. A lot of people fail to understand the difference between strategy and tactic, ‘the what and the how’. My goal will be to highlight the importance of having the right strategies, and also tweaking the strategies as the market changes, brand’s needs changes. Strategies are different for every brand; a launch brand’s strategies are often different than a legacy brand’s. I think the importance of evidence-based research, analytics based strategic direction, and defining clear objectives is key to success.
A good strategy also means figuring out your customers’ journey, whether it’s patients, caregivers, or physicians. Understanding where they’re in need of help and where they’re more receptive to the information you provide them. It helps to understand where we can reach them in the most effective and efficient way.
What are your biggest digital marketing lessons learned in 2024?
For the last few years, we’ve been piloting different non-personal programs, and our most recent program worked well. We just found out the results, and we had a twelve-to-one ROI which was based on a very conservative net profit-based calculation. These pilots need patience since you need some time to measure performance, a good six to nine months,
My biggest lesson learned from this is to never give up trying new things.
Could you give an example of your proudest achievement in terms of digital engagement so far?
This recent example is a good one; It gives us a good opportunity to present to other marketers within the company what we did and why it was successful. It will also bring more attention to our franchise although we have a legacy product.
Earlier in my career at another company, one of my proudest efforts was to establish a social media guideline. It was a huge effort that required working closely with the legal and regulatory department to ensure that we had solid processes to leverage social media channels.
What is the biggest hurdle to overcome in 2024, to get more effective customer engagement?
For me it’s how we can leverage AI tools and marketing. At EMD Serono we’ve formed an “AI Champions” cross-functional group. We evaluate all available AI tools within the company. We have a lot, but not many of us know how we can best leverage them. My goal is to understand each tool, where they reside, and in what way and how we can train ourselves and our teams to use them. I think it’s important to figure out AI and it’s benefits sooner than later. That’s another reason why I want to participate in this NEXT Pharma Summit, because of its focus on AI.
What type of new tactics are you planning to include in your digital engagement in 2025?
We want to evaluate the performance of each of our multi-channel initiatives to understand which had higher customer engagement and performance. From there we can adjust, optimise the content and channels to have an even better impact.
Another thing we’re working on is with our global Digital Health Solutions (DHS) team. We’ve done a lot of research and defined our patient’s journey and understood why how, and where a digital health solution may meet some of their needs. We will be launching a new DHS at the beginning to 2025, a super exciting tool that will help patients identify their symptoms and have conversations with their healthcare professionals sooner.
EMD Serono is the healthcare business of Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany