Veterinary Pharmacy

An online expedition.

My brief stint as an eBusiness Consultant has taught me a lot. One of those things is that the pharmaceutical industry can be a powerful ally in providing the best healthcare for one’s patients. In my case, those patients are usually furry, walk on four legs and sometimes even flap their wings. Now it so happens that I will be the co-owner of a small-animal clinic per february of the new year (2013). As I have been working at the Emergency Clinic at the University Clinic for Companion Animals of late, I have been rather sheltered from the choices one can make with regards to medication (we have our own pharmacy at Uni that decides that sort of thing for us).

So in short: my plan was (and is) to contact the four most important veterinary-pharmaceutical companies to send over a rep to discuss their products with us. The dream of every sales rep: getting invited to a practice.

First problem to solve was to assess what companies are going to be most important to us (product-wise). So I started with my trusty tool: Google! And started running down the list I had jotted down on paper.
Note: The following company names were not on my list in this order, or necessarily on my short-list to begin with… Not going into detail about that here, that is not the point of this specific blog.

Boehringer Ingelheim and AST Farma were the most obliging: both showed full lists of all veterinary products, making it very easy to get product information. I should put a side-note that Boehringer does have dead links to product-pages in the Netherlands on their website, and they might just be breaking the Dutch law with a link to the Quest Trials without one of those annoying pop-ups explaining that you are leaving Boehringer’s Dutch site. Then again, that might not be enough, seeing as they are actively linking towards it (thank god I’m a private person and I’m allowed to link to those trials without consulting my legal department). In addition to that, Boehringer uses the age-old trick to make a site appear ‘up to date’ (which in this case might be a bit tricky) by simply printing today’s date on every page using <span class=”currentDate”>10 december 2012</span>. A bit childish if you ask me. As for AST? I wonder how they manage to make a simple, maybe even simplistic, web-page load so damned slow. Regardless: Big thumbs up to both companies (in this regard, haven’t checked your personal-experience as I have had to with the following two)!

Then on to Pfizer and MSD: To get a look at their product list I had to register as a veterinarian. I know you aren’t allowed to advertise your prescription-only medication to the common public in the Netherlands. But a simple list (with product details and leaflets) should be okay, shouldn’t it? Anyway: registration with MSD was approved within the hour and I got a nice (automated) e-mail telling me I could now login. Now I get to see their clinician centered pages: Very nice. If you live in 2003. In 2012/13 I expect to not only be able to see the PDF of a client-information leaflet, but be able to order them from my local rep as well. Get with the personalisation program! Pfizer attempts to personalize their page a bit more (which put me in rather a pickle: I had to choose between either cats or dogs as “animal you treat the most”), but doesn’t do anything with the information (yet?). They do give me a horrible personal landing page which I quickly flee to look at the product pages. Looks nice enough, but has the same gripe as MSD: flat PDF’s are sooooo last decade. Was expecting a bit more from Pfizer’s VetSupport+ section. Here I was hoping for something hip and cool (contact-wise), but all I got was a bit of information and a lovely picture telling me the phone number of their MCM manager (due to privacy reasons I will not link to the picture and number, even though it was NOT behind a password).

That leaves us with Novartis and Janssen-Cilag. The first is an international site, it simply doesn’t have a dutch one (or I/google can’t find it, which is more or less the same thing). And the second one doesn’t come with any link. That’s my bad probably, because supposedly Janssen-Cilag has sold/moved/whatevered their animal health branch to Elanco. Of course that site isn’t very helpful. So I googled some more. Turns out I have to contact my local branch for more information. Can’t be bothered.

So, concluding: I have my list of four pharma-reps that are going to be invited.

Oude gewoontes sterven langzaam

Een kort blogje deze keer:

Onlangs zag ik met verbazing nieuwsberichten over nieuwe extensies in de vertrouwde URLs. Naast de bekende .nl, .com, .net, etc. gaan er nu vrij invulbare komen. Zoals .coke, .apple (of waarschijnlijker: .i) etc.etc.

Deze ontwikkeling doet met denken aan het UMTS fiasco: vele miljarden werden stukgeslagen op technologie die eigenlijk al verouderd was voordat het in gebruik genomen werd. Simpelweg omdat de URL zijn beste tijd gehad heeft.

Los van wat een hoop marketing jongens nog denken, typen steeds minder mensen direct de URL in. Er wordt ge-googled of op links geklikt die mensen aandragen.

Daarnaast zijn de leuke URLs een beetje op. Hier werd ik mee geconfronteerd toen we een naam (en dus URL) zochten voor ons internetbedrijfje. Het bedrijfje heeft met klussen te maken, maar alles wat klus, werk, job etc. in de titel heeft als URL was al vergeven. Niet in gebruik, maar wel geclaimd door deze of gene investeerder die er een slaatje uit wilde slaan.

Deze twee zaken (mensen gebruiken het niet meer door betere zoek-engines, en bedrijven kunnen geen passende meer vinden) moeten haast wel leiden tot het uitsterven van de URL. Het slijten van nieuwe URLs gaat daar, buiten een gespekte rekening van een aantal organisaties, niks aan veranderen.

Als multinational zou ik er dus nog maar eens goed over nadenken voordat ik hier in zou investeren (los van het feit dat bijvoorbeeld coca cola helemaal geen behoefte zou moeten hebben aan .coke: hun core business is drankjes verkopen, internet-marketing zou dat moeten ondersteunen zonder al te gekke capriolen uit te halen, een coca-cola.com zou daar genoeg voor moeten zijn).