[PRACTICE NOTE] Overcoming Pharma's Cultural Blindspot.

Biopharmaceutical organizations pride themselves on rigor. Evidence is currency. Data is gospel. Clinical precision, statistical confidence, and regulatory discipline define the culture of the industry and underpin its legitimacy. This discipline is not cosmetic. It is existential. It is the reason patients, regulators, and societies place their trust in pharmaceutical innovation, and it is the reason life-saving therapies exist at all. Few industries are as deeply committed to proof, process, and protection as pharma, and few have delivered as much value to humanity as a result.

Yet within this success sits a paradox the industry has been slow to confront. The same culture that enables extraordinary scientific achievement can also create a blind spot around the human systems that determine how science is actually experienced once it leaves the lab. The industry that has mastered the hard factors of discovery, development, and delivery has not always applied the same discipline to the soft factors of culture, belief, and behavior that shape how patients and healthcare professionals experience care in the real world. This is where customer centricity either becomes a lived reality or remains an aspiration.

Behind the scenes in far too many organizations, the cultural DNA of pharma, defined by clinical rigor, statistical confidence, and regulatory exactness, has quietly marginalized leadership behaviors, organizational norms, operating models, and ways of working. These elements are often treated as secondary concerns, viewed as imprecise levers of performance, or dismissed as soft relative to the hard evidence the industry rightly values. In doing so, pharma has underestimated the forces that shape how patients, caregivers, and healthcare professionals experience, adopt, and advocate for innovation in practice. Customer centricity, when viewed through this lens, becomes easy to marginalize. It is framed as aspirational language, a marketing sentiment, or a discretionary initiative rather than as core enterprise infrastructure that determines how the brand actually shows up in the world.

Pharma is patient centric at the level of molecules. It is not always customer-centric at the level of moments.

This distinction matters more now than ever. Healthcare delivery is becoming increasingly consumer driven, digitally mediated, and experiential. Patients and healthcare professionals bring expectations shaped by industries that have redesigned themselves around ease, relevance, and respect. They no longer compare their experiences with one pharma company to another. They compare them to the best experiences they have anywhere. Against that backdrop, cultural blind spots are no longer abstract risks. They are material threats to commercial performance, brand trust, and long-term relevance.

The uncomfortable truth is that customer centricity is not primarily a marketing challenge. It is a cultural one. It is not solved through messaging, campaigns, or platforms. It is solved through leadership behavior, organizational design, operating models, and the everyday ways of working that determine whether an organization helps or hinders the people it serves. This is not about intent. It is about architecture. It is about whether the enterprise has been deliberately designed so that doing the right thing for patients and healthcare professionals is the natural outcome of how work gets done, or whether it still depends on individual heroics.

The next era of pharmaceutical leadership will not be defined by who has the best molecule alone. It will be defined by who can deliver scientific excellence through experiences that build trust, reduce friction, and make it easier for people to succeed in the moments that matter. That requires a cultural shift as profound as any scientific one.

The Paradox at the Heart of Pharma

Organizations in pharma and life sciences are, by intent, necessity, and culture, profoundly patient centric. Clinical development is anchored in patient outcomes. Trial design revolves around endpoints that matter to human lives. Safety monitoring is relentless. The scientific enterprise is organized around protecting, extending, and improving life. This is not rhetoric. It is reality. Few industries are more deeply aligned to the well-being of the people they serve.

Yet patient centricity in science does not automatically translate into customer centricity in experience. Speak to a physician navigating access pathways. Speak to a nurse seeking timely clarification. Speak to a caregiver overwhelmed by reimbursement complexity. Speak to a patient who cannot understand why the system feels so hard to move through when vulnerability is at its peak. The contrast becomes impossible to ignore. The industry is deeply aligned to patients in its mission, but it is often misaligned to patients in its service design.

This is not a contradiction of values. It is a contradiction of design. The operating model that excels at discovering and proving molecules is not the same operating model required to deliver human-centered care. The skills that optimize trials do not automatically translate into the capabilities needed to optimize journeys. One global brand leader once captured it candidly when he noted that "while the organization was exceptional at proving efficacy, it was far less effective at proving value to HCPs". That distinction now defines competitive advantage. It is the difference between a brand that is admired in theory and one that is trusted in practice.

When Hard Factors Crowd Out the Human System

Pharma’s operating logic has been optimized for decades around evidence generation, compliance management, and efficient product distribution. That optimization has served the industry well, producing breakthrough therapies, global scale, and extraordinary advances in human health. It has also shaped culture in ways that are rarely examined.

In many organizations, anything that cannot be measured with scientific precision is treated with caution. Leadership behaviors, belief systems, and cultural norms are often seen as subjective. Experience is framed as qualitative. Empathy is viewed as intangible. Over time, the industry learns to privilege what can be proven over what can be felt, and the very factors that shape trust, clarity, ease, and confidence are quietly deprioritized, even as they increasingly influence prescribing behavior, adherence, and brand loyalty.

This creates a subtle but powerful imbalance. Regulatory caution hardens into reflex. Compliance interpretation becomes a proxy for conservatism rather than a platform for responsible innovation. Risk avoidance quietly replaces customer advocacy as the dominant decision filter. Innovation flourishes in the lab while experience stagnates in the field. Omnichannel platforms, patient support programs, and digital tools are layered onto legacy structures without the cultural alignment required to make them effective. The tools evolve. The mindset does not.

At a practical level, this shows up in familiar ways:

• Digital tools are layered onto legacy processes without rethinking the underlying experience.

• Patient support programs are added without simplifying access pathways.

• Omnichannel strategies expand reach without reducing effort.

In many organizations, the intent to serve patients and healthcare professionals is genuine and deeply held, yet the systems surrounding that intent were never designed to enable it. When aspiration is forced to operate inside architectures built for control, efficiency, and internal convenience, the outcome is rarely surprising. Frustration replaces momentum, workarounds replace progress, and even the most committed teams find themselves constrained by structures that were never built to support the experience they are trying to create.

In one large organization, a patient support leader described spending more time navigating internal approval pathways than actually improving the patient experience. The intent was strong, but the system and ways of working were not designed to support it.

What is often missed is that these structural constraints do not just undermine experience. They quietly define how the brand shows up in the world. When processes are cumbersome, when handoffs are brittle, and when escalation paths are unclear, customers do not blame the system. They experience the brand.

Mono-Culture in an Omnichannel World

This misalignment is reinforced by what can best be described as mono-culture operating in a multi-channel world. Within this environment, each function quite rationally optimizes for its own definition of success. Marketing focuses on campaign performance and message delivery. Sales is driven by activity levels and call metrics. Medical concentrates on the quality and integrity of information exchange. Access teams are measured by reimbursement milestones and pathway progression.

Each of these priorities makes sense in isolation. Taken together, they reveal an enterprise optimized for functional performance rather than for the coherence of the customer experience.

From the inside, the organization appears efficient. Dashboards glow. Plans align. Activity flows. From the perspective of healthcare professionals, however, it often feels disjointed. Messages arrive without continuity. Digital engagement competes with field time rather than complementing it. Access complexity undermines confidence built through clinical dialogue. Support services feel disconnected from the realities of practice.

At the level of lived experience, that fragmentation shows up in predictable ways:

• A digital message reinforces a clinical narrative that the field team is no longer leading with.

• An access delay undermines confidence that was carefully built in a medical conversation.

• A patient support referral arrives after the moment of need has already passed.

None of these failures are dramatic. All of them are corrosive. They are not breakdowns in execution. They are breakdowns in orchestration.

Field teams are often left to reconcile these disconnects in real time, translating fragmented strategies into something that can be understood and acted upon in a ten-minute office visit. They are asked to represent an integrated enterprise that does not yet operate as one, and to absorb complexity on behalf of the customer without being given the authority or system support to resolve it. This is where culture becomes visible. It is also where its absence becomes costly.

This is not a failure of omnichannel execution. It is a failure of cultural integration and ways of working. When organizations optimize functions independently, they inadvertently force customers to absorb the cost of that fragmentation. Over time, even well-intentioned engagement begins to feel burdensome rather than helpful, not because any individual interaction is wrong, but because the totality of the experience lacks coherence.

In these moments, brand is not expressed through advertising. It is expressed through friction.

Why Culture and Ways of Working Are Commercial Issues

This blind spot matters because culture is not abstract. In markets where clinical differentiation narrows and therapeutic alternatives proliferate, experience increasingly shapes prescribing confidence, brand loyalty, and long-term franchise strength. Healthcare professionals rarely articulate this explicitly, yet their behavior reflects it.

It shows up in quiet decisions:

• Which brands they default to when time is short.

• Which companies they trust when complexity rises.

• Which partners they avoid when the administrative burden feels disproportionate.

These choices are rarely framed as experience judgments. They are almost always experience driven.

Organizations that fail to address culture and ways of working at the enterprise level often misdiagnose declining engagement as a tactical problem, responding with more content, more calls, more channels, and more pressure. This accelerates activity without addressing the underlying experience. Conversely, organizations that align leadership behaviors, incentives, and operating models around customer outcomes begin to see compounding returns. Engagement improves not because pressure increases, but because relevance does.

The commercial future of pharma will not be decided solely by molecules or messaging. It will be shaped by whether organizations can deliver scientific excellence through experiences that build trust and confidence over time. This is where culture becomes strategy.

What Consumer Brands Understand About Culture as a Commercial System

Long before customer experience became a board-level topic and long before culture was rediscovered as a strategic lever, a small group of consumer brands quietly built their competitive advantage around how work actually gets done. Not around campaigns. Not around positioning. Around culture, ways of working, and the everyday behaviors that determine whether a company shows up as helpful or hollow.

In financial services CX, USAA structured itself around life events rather than product lines, training its teams to recognize moments of stress and vulnerability and to respond with authority and empathy. In retail CX, IKEA designed its stores, supply chain, and self-service model around a belief that customers are capable and resourceful if the system respects their intelligence. Decathlon organized its teams around sports communities rather than merchandising categories, embedding passion into performance. In hospitality CX, CitizenM redefined the genre by empowering frontline teams to resolve issues without escalation and by designing spaces around how modern travelers actually live.

In each case, culture is not decorative. It is directive. In practical terms, that means:

• Frontline teams are trusted with judgment, not just scripts.

• Systems are designed to remove friction, not just manage volume.

• Policies are written to enable resolution, not deflection.

This is why culture becomes competitive advantage rather than internal rhetoric.

These brands did not stumble into customer centricity, they architected for it. At the leadership, organizational, operational, and commercial DNA-level, they made deliberate choices about how work should flow, how decisions should be made, and how much judgment to trust their people with. Culture, for them, is not a moral statement. It is a commercial system.

This is the standard pharma is now being benchmarked against, whether the industry acknowledges it or not. Healthcare professionals are also consumers. Patients are also customers. Their expectations are being shaped by these experiences, not by other pharmaceutical companies.

From Mono-Culture to Customer Excellence Culture

From Mono Culture to Customer Excellence Culture

The remedy is not another program layered onto an already overburdened organization, but a deliberate cultural redesign that shifts the enterprise from functional mono culture to a shared predisposition toward customer outcomes. A Customer Excellence culture does not diminish the importance of marketing excellence, sales excellence, medical rigor, or access discipline, nor does it attempt to blur the lines of accountability that are necessary in a regulated environment. Instead, it integrates these disciplines through a common orientation around what success actually feels like to the physician, the patient, and the caregiver as they move through real clinical, emotional, and administrative realities.

This is the difference between an organization that cares about customers and an organization that is structurally wired to serve them. In consumer-grade organizations, this predisposition is embedded in the architecture, the DNA, of the enterprise itself, shaping how strategy is interpreted, how priorities are set, and how trade-offs are evaluated. The system naturally bends toward human reality because it has been designed that way. Pharma, by contrast, has historically been predisposed around functions, brands, compliance pathways, and portfolio priorities, which is entirely rational given its scientific and regulatory obligations, but it also explains why experience remains fragmented, episodic, and overly dependent on individual heroics.

In Customer Excellence cultures, decisions are guided not only by what can be executed compliantly, but by how those choices will be experienced in practice by people who are under pressure, short on time, and often operating in emotionally charged conditions.

Language gradually shifts from activity and output to usefulness and impact. Incentive structures evolve to reward coherence across the journey rather than volume within a function. Governance forums are redesigned so experience risks and value leaks surface early in the lifecycle rather than being discovered after launch, when the cost of change is highest and the customer cost is already being paid. Ways of working are deliberately reshaped so teams plan and operate around journeys rather than organizational boundaries, which is how predisposition moves from an abstract ideal to an operational capability. This is what consumer-grade predisposition looks like when it is taken seriously as a design principle rather than a cultural aspiration. The open question is whether pharma is willing to make the same structural commitment and embed this level of customer orientation into its own commercial and operating DNA.

Customer-Centric Culture and How Brands Show Up in the World

Customer centricity only becomes durable when it is embedded into culture and ways of working, not when it exists as language, intention, or leadership rhetoric. In Customer Excellence organizations, being customer centered is not a value statement, a brand positioning, or a campaign theme. It is a behavioral norm that shapes how decisions are made, how work is designed, and how teams are expected to operate.

This begins with leadership behavior. In customer-centric cultures, leaders evaluate decisions not only through financial and regulatory lenses, but through the lived impact on HCPs and patients. The question is no longer simply whether something can be executed compliantly or efficiently, but whether it will reduce friction, improve clarity, and make it easier for customers to succeed in real clinical environments. What is funded, what is escalated, and what is stopped gradually reshapes the organization’s priorities and, by extension, the way the brand is experienced in the world.

As culture shifts, ways of working must follow. Customer-centered organizations move away from activity-based planning and toward journey-based operating models that reflect how care is actually delivered rather than how functions are structured. Instead of each function optimizing its own deliverables, teams align around shared customer outcomes. Marketing, sales, medical, and access no longer operate as sequential handoffs, but as coordinated contributors to a coherent experience.

In organizations that have made this shift, you can feel the difference:

• Field teams are empowered to solve, not simply to relay.

• Medical engagement anticipates decision needs rather than responding after confidence has eroded.

• Access interactions are designed to remove friction rather than redirecting it.

The work changes because the beliefs underneath it have changed.

Insight generation also changes fundamentally. Rather than relying primarily on episodic surveys that compete with scarce healthcare professional time and face regulatory barriers in many markets, customer-centric organizations build continuous listening systems into their ways of working. These systems draw on field interactions, digital behavior, medical inquiries, access friction, and service conversations to provide real-time context on what customers are actually experiencing. This intelligence does not sit in a dashboard. It informs how work is prioritized, how engagement is shaped, and how resources are deployed. Over time, this creates a feedback loop between lived experience and organizational design that continually refines how the brand shows up in practice.

In this model, customer centricity becomes the connective tissue between go-to-market strategy and go-to-customer reality. Go-to-market defines how the organization intends to compete. Go-to-customer reflects how those choices are actually experienced in clinics, hospitals, and patient homes. Customer Excellence cultures close that gap by ensuring that planning decisions translate into value rather than noise. Field engagement becomes grounded in relevance rather than activity. Digital channels respect attention rather than amplifying repetition. Access interactions remove friction rather than redirecting it. Medical engagement anticipates decision needs rather than responding after confidence has already eroded.

The brand, in this context, is no longer what is said. It is what is lived.

Conclusion: The Leap Worth Making

Pharma’s blind spot is cultural. Its opportunity is cultural transformation. The industry that once defined its competitive advantage by molecules must now expand that definition to include the moments, journeys, and human interactions that determine whether those molecules make a difference in the real world.

Customer centricity is not a slogan. It is not a slide in a brand plan. It is the cultural infrastructure upon which the next era of pharmaceutical leadership will be built. The question is no longer whether the industry must make this leap. The question is who will have the courage to lead it.

Key Takeaways

• Customer centricity is a cultural capability, not a communications strategy. It is revealed in how work actually gets done, not in what leaders say or brands claim.

• Functional excellence without cultural integration transfers complexity to the customer. When the enterprise is fragmented, patients and healthcare professionals are forced to navigate the seams.

• The field force is the clearest mirror of the system. How field teams experience the organization is how customers ultimately experience the brand.

• Culture is a leading indicator of commercial performance. It shapes trust, preference, and resilience long before those outcomes appear in dashboards.

• The next era of advantage will belong to those who redesign, not those who merely optimize. Incremental improvement cannot compensate for structural misalignment.

Diagnostic Questions for Leaders

• Where does our operating model quietly make life harder for healthcare professionals and patients than it needs to be? Not in theory. In practice.

• When tradeoff decisions are made, whose experience actually carries weight in the room? The customer’s, the system’s, or the organization’s convenience.

• Are our ways of working shaped around how care is truly delivered, or around how we are internally organized? Would a physician recognize themselves in our model, or only our org chart.

• How often are field teams absorbing complexity they did not create in order to protect the customer experience? And what does that reveal about the design of the enterprise behind them.

• If our brand were experienced across sales, medical, and access in the same week, would it feel like one coherent partner or several disconnected entities? The answer is cultural, not tactical.

About

Wayne Simmons is the author of The Customer Excellence Enterprise. He is a global customer excellence and customer experience leader, a former Inc. 500 founder and CEO, and a founding faculty member of North America’s first master’s degree program in Customer Experience Management at Michigan State University. His work focuses on helping pharmaceutical and life sciences organizations embed customer-centricity, experience delivery, and commercial excellence into how their businesses actually operate. This article is part of Wayne’s ongoing Customer Excellence Insights series, exploring how brand, experience, and commercial strategy must evolve in the age of AI, Experiential Commerce, and rising consumer-grade expectations. For deeper perspective on customer-centric transformation, experience-led growth, and the future of marketing and CX, you can also follow his newsletter, The Customer-Centric Marketer.