Friday, February 06, 2009
Pfizer Vice President Worldwide Communications: “How in the hell do we have such a bad reputation?!”
In 2007, on the second day of his new job as Pfizer's global PR chief, Ray Kerins said he was told of an unwritten rule: ignore the first question received from any reporter on any given issue . . . he is now asking his people to spend more time with journalists.
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4 comments:
It kind of makes you wonder just how deep a bucket of sand these guys have their heads suck in?
Well, Ray, as you are a fairly new guy, here's a few ideas that might help you win back a bit of the public respect that your industry has squandered over the years.
1) Get your company to STOP ACTING ILLEGALLY. You've just handed over yet another couple of billion to settle yet another off-label marketing scam. People don't like criminal organisations, Ray.
Like everyone else, I appreciate that illegal marketing earns the company far more money than it pays out in fines, but you're sending all the wrong messages, aren't you?
2) Try and be seen to be acting a touch more ethically. People still sort of expect big healthcare companies to have morals, even though they're now just big money-making machines, like any other business these days. But everyone knows that Third World clinical trials and outsourcing to the far east are all about cost-saving and side-stepping regulation. You brought the regulation upon yourselves by all lf your sleazy marketing activities, so at least try and be seen to be playing by the rules instead of sulking and taking your ball abroad.
3) Stop paying obscene salaries and bonuses to mediocre executives. I know it's the fashion these days to pay execs ever more venal "compensation packages" irrespective of results, but Joe Public got tired of that in the light of the laziness and economic failure that this philosophy has resulted in. Maybe you should actually start paying your execs by results. Insulating them from the consequences of failure is hardly an incentive for corporate success.
4) Stop lying. Dogdy OTC ads for Lipitor and sticking your head in the sand about the side effects of drugs like Chantix does little to inspire confidence in your products.
5) Stop acting like a corporate shark with all these mergers and takeovers. At what point does expecting success from repeating an action that has been proven to fail cease being optimism and become stupidity? Your management team just seem to be doing the same old things because they don't have any other ideas, safe in the knowledge that if it all goes wrong, the worst they can expect is an eight or nine-figure pay-off, a multi-million dollar annual pension for life and a few lucrative non-exec directorships somewhere.
And the public, your shareholder and your employees are sick of it all. Your lastest leveraged buy-out of Wyeth is only staving off the inevitable collapse created by your complete inability to work out what makes R&D tick. You've now used borrowed billions of bank bail-out money to finance a take-over that is only going to throw tens more thouands out of work and damage local and national economies even more. Everyone, but everyone (including your shareholders, whio have just wiped 20% off you tsock value, such is their enthusias for the deal) can see this, and yet you wonder why people don't like you? Doh...
I oculd go on. But there's a few ideas to go with, Ray...
Well said!!!!
Well said indeed. Ray - You sound like the brightest 3 year old in a small town!
- You guys do a great developing products that save lives. However thru off-label promotions, your products have also resulted in deaths and injuries.
- You guys are killing democracy too. For example exploit IRS loop holes to park your cash abroad and and pay taxes at a rate of 20% (i.e the rate at which someone making $40,000 a year does). Then when you need that money to buy Wyeth, you lobby congress to give a one time exception to repatriate cash from abroad. You then lobby your employees thru your PAC to e-mail their senator on this issue.
- Sometimes you guys sponsor shoddy research from KOLS/Pimps that really reach dangerous conclusions (Nemeroff, Bilderman etc)
Remember Ray, actions speak much louder than words
Its not that you promote life saving drugs, its the over priced supply and control of these medications to people you need them. What about the exorbitant junkets, drinks, dinners, flights, and lets not forget flying country managers across regions to celebrate retiring area presidents and so called senior leaders. To fly these highly paid senior executives and their significant other across Asia for 3 or more days to play golf and drink to your hearts content is absolutely disgusting, unethical, integrity lacking, and so forth. Can you report the actual meeting content and the time with which all who had attended and for how long. Also how much did the meeting time comprise of the total time of the junket? 8 hours from the total 72 hours.
Lets not forget, its these people who are charged with making contributors of Pfizer redundant at the slightest difficulty when the organization cannot meet its committed numbers. This is certainly not the behavior of an upstanding company. Shame on you and shame on your so called leaders!
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