How to build a trusted pharma brand

SPONSORED BY T&R

To go back to the foun­da­tion of STADA is to scroll through the mod­ern his­to­ry of med­i­cine. The year 1895 pre­dates the dis­cov­ery of aspirin or insulin. In Bavaria, Wil­helm Rönt­gen would take anoth­er decade to detect x‑rays. In Vien­na, Karl Land­stein­er iden­ti­fied the main blood groups only at the turn of the cen­tu­ry.

“We have come a long way,” says Peter Gold­schmidt, chief exec­u­tive of STADA. “While we remain true to the val­ues of the for­ward-think­ing chemists who found­ed STADA in Dres­den back then, we are now tru­ly glob­al as one STADA.”

A cen­tu­ry-and-a-quar­ter lat­er and STADA, known in the UK main­ly as Thorn­ton & Ross, is active world­wide, trad­ing in more than 120 coun­tries, with around 12,400 employ­ees and over €2.6 bil­lion in annu­al sales. It’s a moment to reflect. How, exact­ly, did STADA grow from its roots in Ger­man phar­ma­cy to become a glob­al leader in gener­ics and con­sumer health?

“Our guid­ing star is our pur­pose: car­ing for people’s health as a trust­ed part­ner,” explains Gold­schmidt. “This means work­ing close­ly with hos­pi­tals, phar­ma­cies, sup­ply-chain part­ners and patients to pro­vide high-qual­i­ty prod­ucts.”

Regard­less of whether it is sup­ply­ing high-qual­i­ty pre­scrip­tion or con­sumer health prod­ucts, STADA focus­es on max­imis­ing the val­ue offered to health­care pro­fes­sion­als and patients as a trust­ed part­ner. For exam­ple, a nov­el ready-to-use for­mu­la­tion of a wide­ly-used can­cer drug gave physi­cians a safer and time-sav­ing means of treat­ing mul­ti­ple myelo­ma, sav­ing the NHS £6 mil­lion in the process.

Gold-stan­dard treat­ments for life-threat­en­ing dis­eases, such as can­cer, osteo­poro­sis and Parkinson’s, are key ele­ments of STADA’s port­fo­lio, espe­cial­ly as the com­pa­ny increas­ing­ly push­es into biosim­i­lars, or equiv­a­lent ver­sions of orig­i­nal bio­log­i­cal drugs. But the group, espe­cial­ly Thorn­ton & Ross in the UK, is also wide­ly recog­nised for its pop­u­lar con­sumer health­care prod­ucts such as Cov­o­nia cough reme­dies, Hedrin head-lice treat­ments and Oila­tum skin creams that enable peo­ple to treat their own ail­ments.

Thorn­ton & Ross head Roger Scar­lett-Smith points out that offer­ing patients and con­sumers inno­v­a­tive solu­tions, such as with its well-loved Zoflo­ra dis­in­fec­tants, is cen­tral to the company’s vision. “We do not try to do every­thing our­selves,” he acknowl­edges. “Part­ner­ships are essen­tial to our busi­ness mod­el.”

Work­ing as a part­ner to health­care sys­tems is also essen­tial to STADA’s vision. For instance, in the UK, Thorn­ton & Ross is the NHS’s lead­ing sup­pli­er of emol­lients, hav­ing donat­ed more than 100,000 sam­ples to NHS staff dur­ing the cur­rent pan­dem­ic.

To deliv­er on this com­mit­ment to part­ner­ship in the broad­er health­care con­text, STADA com­piles an annu­al Health Report which, in its 2020 edi­tion, is based on sur­vey­ing more than 24,000 peo­ple across 12 Euro­pean coun­tries. The report pro­vides insights into health-relat­ed top­ics includ­ing vac­cines, antibi­otics, sex and death.

For exam­ple, the 2020 sur­vey revealed sat­is­fac­tion with the nation­al health­care sys­tem was high­est in Switzer­land, Aus­tria and Bel­gium (90 per cent). On the cur­rent hot top­ic of com­pul­so­ry vac­ci­na­tion, a key issue in the COVID era, in Spain and Fin­land around nine in ten favour com­pul­so­ry vac­ci­na­tion, yet in Switzer­land, Aus­tria and Rus­sia around 30 per cent oppose it. Telemed­i­cine is grow­ing in accep­tance, with sev­en in ten in Europe now open to exam­i­na­tion via web­cam.

There are some intrigu­ing nation­al idio­syn­crasies. A third of peo­ple in the UK have no idea which dis­eases are affect­ed by genes and 40 per cent of Bel­gians cat­e­gor­i­cal­ly nev­er talk about sex. The results are vital in shap­ing pub­lic pol­i­cy on health­care.

“Being a trust­ed part­ner is at the heart of what STADA does,” Gold­schmidt con­cludes. “Both organ­i­cal­ly and through tar­get­ed alliances and acqui­si­tions, we con­tin­ue to expand our high-qual­i­ty, afford­able offer­ing for health­care pro­fes­sion­als and patients so we can deliv­er on our pur­pose of car­ing for people’s health as a trust­ed part­ner.”

To find out more please vis­it www.stada.com and www.thorntonross.com