It’s not just a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Cambridge University in England that wins Wendy Dixon immediate credibility with research and development staff at Bristol-Myers Squibb. It’s also 20 years in pharmaceutical marketing and a passion for working with scientists to develop and bring to market new medicines that meet customer needs around the world.

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It’s hard to imagine how the CEO could have made a better choice for a Chief Marketing Officer to spearhead an organizational transformation to marketing excellence. I talked to her about how she leads the marketing team’s work with scientists to make sure new products are developed with an understanding of the marketplace and customer needs.

Young: How is marketing structured at Bristol-Myers Squibb?

Dixon: We have a marketing function which in recent years has been established as a much stronger entity within the company. We have a global marketing function which is responsible for working very closely with the scientists to set up overall product strategy and understand the marketplace and customer needs, particularly for future new products. It is responsible to set up the overall global strategy for new products and for providing that input into the scientists as they work their way through the development process. The global marketing group works hand-in-hand with, and transitions work through, the regional marketing teams in the different countries as they launch new products or they launch an extension or some kind of additional aspect of an existing product into the marketplace.

Young: How is marketing in the pharmaceutical industry different from other industries?

Dixon: Pharmaceutical marketing is very complex because we’re dealing with science. We’re trying to market to a whole range of different customers—physicians, payers, consumers, governments. It is a highly regulated industry, as I’m sure you know. There are very strict—appropriately strict—regulations around how you can represent scientific data and how you can promote it and it has to be consistent with the results of clinical trials, etc. So, it’s an extraordinarily complex business, but very rewarding, because, obviously, we’re in the job of commercializing and bringing new products to patients who need them.

Young: You mentioned that in the last few years, marketing has become more central to the overall strategy of the company. How did that come to be?

Dixon: Our CEO is very focused on pharmaceuticals and related healthcare business, but, in past years, there were a number of other companies within the Bristol-Myers Squibb family that were more consumer driven companies, such as Clairol, which is a hair care company. He’s been involved in the pharmaceutical industry for a number of years, [but] actually started his career in the consumer side of the world. And so he has a strong heritage in traditional consumer packaged goods marketing. His vision was for us to differentiate ourselves as a company by applying, where possible and where appropriate, the principles and insights and methodologies that are used in consumer marketing to the pharmaceutical commercialization process. He put in place this heightened sense of importance of marketing and market partnerships—so that, on the one hand, the scientists and the marketers worked closely to understand and respect each other’s needs and challenges, and, on the other hand, create a culture of marketing excellence in the organization.

Young: I assume the CEO can’t press a button and make it happen. How does it filter down?

Dixon: Well, then you hire me, as a Chief Marketing Officer, and we put in place a very strong market research organization. I put into place a transformational initiative around creating a marketing culture of marketing excellence, and we put the right people in place to work collaboratively with our scientists, and the right people in place to make sure that we have very strong marketers who are launching our new brands and working with the regions to launch the new brands. So, this cultural transformation—any change, culture change, transformational change that needs to go in the company—takes a number of years. But it absolutely requires leadership from the very top, where then it needs to have a team of people who are lieutenants of the guy at the top who are all aligned and driving through the organization.

Young: What were the barriers you needed to overcome in the transformation process?

Dixon: I’ve heard from many industries is that the scientists and marketers don’t talk with each other. But actually, I think this is one of the things that’s gone particularly well. Our scientists as a whole are sophisticated enough and open enough—particularly when they have the opportunity to work with strong, knowledgeable marketers—to recognize that they will be able to do their jobs better if they work with the marketers, understand the customers’ needs and integrate those needs into their development programs for products. And I’ve been very, very impressed by the partnership which truly has a commitment from both sides of the organization. It boils down to the individuals involved. This transformation to marketing excellence has been something that everybody in the company wanted to have. It’s a lot of work, but people have been very receptive to have it developed and to learn new skills.

Understanding the division of responsibilities between the global marketing organization and the regional marketing organization is where we have had some challenges. We are careful to monitor who is doing what so there is no duplication, people aren’t treading on other people’s toes and people aren’t bent out of shape.

Young: Can you briefly take me through the way you interact with science and product development?

Dixon: We have a governing committee called Brand Development Operating Committee, co-chaired between myself and the head of clinical and the head of regulatory affairs. And then we have teams that report to us that are dedicated to developing and commercializing a new brand. For example, these two leaders—one clinical and one global marketing—are 100% focused on the successful development and commercialization of Abilify, our new schizophrenia drug that we launched last year. Because they are co-leading the development and commercialization, it mirrors what’s done at this Committee level. They are jointly responsible, with shared objectives and shared incentive plans. They live together, virtually, with this brand, and so, there’s tremendous partnership there. Openness and understanding of the scientific needs and issues and, similarly, the clinical people are very understanding and receptive to understanding market research and how we can integrate that into the designing clinical trials. Out in the marketplace, our medical affairs organization continues to work closely with the regional marketers, and they design new clinical trials for in-line products.

Young: What about marketing and sales, traditionally a place of potential conflict? How is that working in the transformation?

Dixon: I’m actually less familiar with that in my role here in global marketing. My sense is that, in the same way as the organization has done a good job of stepping up and providing a partnership between science and marketing, I think that there’s good connectivity between the leaders in the sales and the marketing organization.

Young: And what about finance?

Dixon: Oh, absolutely. We have a finance person dedicated to each team in each organization.

Young: How do you measure your effectiveness?

Dixon: Well, we have a very rigorous process in place where we create what we call “dashboards” to measure all kinds of metrics, well beyond just financial measures. We’re measuring attitudes in the marketplace, feedback from customers, market sales force effectiveness and efficiency—a very complex set of very detailed and granular metrics that we measure on a very regular basis and meet, review, and take action if things are not going as anticipated, whether they may be going better than anticipated or less well than anticipated. Now, the financial measures are part of that, obviously, in terms of sales, etc. There are a lot of subtle diagnostics that go [into measuring effectiveness]. You can’t just measure sales; that’s a very coarse measure.

Young: So what is your greatest challenge now?

Dixon: I think the greatest challenge we have is to train people around the world in marketing excellence—in China, in Argentina, in the United States, and France, and England, and all around the world—so that we have a common way of thinking and going about marketing at a very high and sophisticated level. And, as you can imagine, if you have set that goal for all marketers around the world, they’re coming in at different stages of sophistication. But the good news is that there’s tremendous appetite for this and there’s tremendous senior management alignment about the importance of this. Nevertheless, this is a multiyear initiative.

Young: Do you have indicators that the transformation has been successful?

Dixon: We have fielded one round of market research and have definitely seen the needle move on all kinds of measures, ranging from attitude to performance. And we have our next survey going in the next few weeks, and we’ll get the results in December. So, I guess the first answer is we’ve got the metrics in place to measure against, and we are just starting to collect the information to see the progress to date. So far, things seem like they’re headed in the right direction, which is very exciting.

Young: When you look for staff to help you make this marketing transformation, what are you looking for?

Dixon: Well, in my senior level people, I’m looking for people who have a love of marketing. Marketing is like playing six dimensional chess. And that person could come from a pharmaceutical company and, in some instances, we have some very senior marketers who’ve had most of their career in the consumer marketer role, but we have felt that they are so exceptional that we will teach them pharmaceutical marketing. I’m looking for people who have a love of the problem, a love of understanding the customer, have good leadership and interpersonal integration skills, because you have to interact with so many different stakeholders, that they need to be able to interface with a full range of stakeholders. So they need to have a strong interest in marketing, a strong appetite, a very curious mind, and an ability to demonstrate innovative thinking outside-of-the-box way of approaching problems. It’s helpful also to have somebody who has had an experience close to the customer—sales experience or general management experience. And I’m looking for a seasoned marketing professional who’s been in the business for 10-15 years; those are the senior level jobs.

Young: Does a brand manager for a new pharmaceutical product actually manage the business? Or is that someone else?

Dixon: Well it depends. If you’re talking about an in-line product that is already in the market, then the different country heads of those businesses will run those businesses with global marketing providing strategic guidance and alignment.

For our new products, we have a transition phase where we have this chap who runs the launch team with the critical person I described earlier—we call them Brand Champions. They’re responsible for overseeing the commercialization and launch for a new brand for the first year or so post-launch. So it’s a year of transition from a global strategy perspective into the actual individual regions—a transition of taking ownership of a new brand that just got approved to when it becomes part of their in-line set of brands, when there’s responsibility from a P&L perspective in those different countries.

What we’re driving hard for is global strategy and global alignments. The pharmaceutical industry, in the past has—in some instances even with global brands—ended up with different trade names, different strategies, different branding images, etc. We believe that the world is global, that we’re developing our new products on a global basis, and we need to have a global presence, a global image and a global strategy for these products.

Young: What do you expect will change for marketing in the next three to five years?

Dixon: In pharmaceutical marketing there are some extraordinarily new complex technologies that are coming down the pike. I’m not necessarily sure whether they’ll be here in three to five years, but if we start talking about pharmical genomics where you can develop drugs that are specific for a subset of patients who have a certain genome, there’s going to be much more targets, scientific work that will lead to complex targeting and segmenting patient types in the marketplace. That’s one I call a technical challenge. The pharmaceutical industry around the world is being challenged to think of ways to deliver marketing and sales activities more effectively and more efficiently, and so trying to find innovative ways of reaching the customer will be a major challenge as well.

Young: What are you most proud of in your career?

Dixon: I’m proud of having been associated with a number of very, very important medicines over my career. I can look back and say, Wow, I really helped bring some important products to the marketplace to help people. I was involved, when I was much younger, with Tagamet, and I’ve been involved with Fosamax, Singulair, Vioxx, Abilify, Reopro, several other products, so I feel really excited about having had the opportunity to do that. And I’m very proud of my particular role.

I’ve been in pharmaceutical marketing for about 20 years, but I actually started my career as a scientist. And so what is particularly satisfying to me is to be able to be as effective as possible in understanding the scientist and understanding the marketplace to help drive commercialization development of these products.

Young: I imagine your science background has contributed to the success you’ve had working with the scientists in your organization.

Dixon: Yes. I have a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Cambridge in England.

Young: Let me just end by asking you, as a Chief Marketing Officer, if you were to move on, what would you say in a note to your successor?

Dixon: Stick with the transformational culture change, it’s important. Personally get involved with the science and marketing partnership and drive it. Drive marketing excellence to touch the very earliest stage products as well as reaching out and continuing to work with the regional areas to assure that we have consistent strategies for our brands around the world. I would also encourage them to continue to make sure that we are attracting, developing and retaining the strongest marketers for this company.