Words for pharma: a quantitative and qualitative analysis on vision, mission and values of multinational pharmaceutical companies

Introduction

Pharmaceutical companies deal with what is perhaps the same important challenges that humans face in their lifetime: healthy growth, maintaining health and, if an acute or chronic disease occurs, to recover as quickly as possible and/or prevent complications from those diseases.

In order to meet these challenges, pharma companies face a rather unique industry and market scenario. In fact, their business depends upon their research and development (R&D) programme, including the careful testing of their drugs in clinical trials, the submission of registration dossiers to regulatory agencies for approval and the timely engagement of their direct customers (i.e. the physicians, the pharmacists, the regulators and the payors) to secure a rapid and effective market access. Yet, none of these stakeholders is the final user, that is, the individual patient, who benefits from drug treatment together with his/her family members and/or caregivers.

The crucial role of pharma companies in preserving health would suggest that they might rank highly in the reputation indexes. However, this does not seem to be the case (1, 2).

Corporations in different business environments use specific wording to communicate their philosophy and their brand identity: commonly, but not always, they articulate the company vision, the company mission and the company values (3) and sometimes they summarize them by adding a short tagline to their brand.

The main purpose of our study was to collect, cluster and analyse the words used by pharma companies in their corporate statements, in order to identify common themes (such as innovation, patient centricity, breadth of offering, operational excellence, outcome, trust) and to identify the words used most frequently by pharma companies worldwide. This might help to identify which themes could be useful to better familiarize customers, improve pharma company reputation and, ultimately, their business value.

Methods

The initial selection of companies was based on their size and market share. We identified the top 50 global companies, based on the rankingthebrand report (4). In addition, we identified a convenience sample of an additional 48 multinationals selected according to where their headquarters (HQ) were based in the most important pharma markets in Europe (UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Portugal). The identification and the final selection were based on desktop research, as well as on suggestions by expert colleagues in those countries. Names of individuals are listed in the acknowledgement section.

Finally, we applied the predetermined exclusion criteria to exclude the suggested companies which appeared to be active only in one country and/or did not have an English-language corporate website. The corporate websites were searched to identify and list the following statements: mission, vision and company values. Specific URLs for each company analysed are listed in Supplementary Table I. We also identified whether companies had a specific “tagline”, defined as a short statement embedded and/or closely linked to the company name/logo. The search was performed between March and July 2019, and data were checked a second time in December 2019. Data extraction was performed by authors (FGC, GZ) independently, and disagreements were resolved by discussion.

We clustered words used in vision, mission and payoff statements in four broad domains/themes:

Standard descriptive analyses were performed on number and frequency of words reported in company values. Whenever words with a similar meaning (i.e. agility and simplicity) were listed together they were counted as one in the quantitative analysis. With reference to comparison between groups, categorical data were analysed using the contingency table analysis with the chi-square or Fisher’s exact test, as appropriate, whereas continuous data were analysed using a Student’s t-test, after checking whether data were normally distributed (based on the Shapiro-Wilk statistic, or a Wilcoxon rank-sum test otherwise. All tests were two-sided and a p value of less than 0.05 was considered statistically significant. Data analyses were conducted using SAS version 9.4 (SAS Institute, Cary, NC, USA) statistical software.

Finally, two overall word cloud analyses were performed using the freely available TagCloud (tagcloud.com) app on the internet, which is considered the most appropriate when “strict, clear measurement is more important than aesthetics” (5). The first word cloud included all words appearing in mission, vision and tagline, the second included all words appearing in company value statements.

Results

Out of the top 50 global companies included in the rankingthebrand website (4), Shire was acquired by Takeda in the meantime and since its website reflected this change, it was not included in the present analysis.

Table I shows the taglines of the top global companies (31 out of 49): 42% of these pharma companies have tagline either embedded in their logo or very prominently listed on the header and/or landing page of the company website. In most cases we were able to identify what appeared to be mission (90.7%) and vision (54.6%) company statements. Out of the 49 companies, 36 (73.4%) had values. Mean number of values was 4.9 ±1.7 SD, median 4, range from 2 to 10.

Company values for the top 50 global companies are shown in Supplementary Table II.

Table II illustrates the taglines for the convenience sample of smaller companies selected for our study. Out of the 48 companies analysed, 33 (68.7%) listed values. Mean number of values 5.3±1.9 SD, median value 4, range 3 to 10. Company values for the smaller companies are shown in Supplementary Table III.

To have a holistic view of the most frequent words used by pharma in their mission, vision and taglines, we combined the statements from the entire set of companies and performed an overall word cloud of all the names, attributes and verbs used in those statements. Figure 1 illustrates the TagCloud of the top 100 words used in company statement. The words “life/lives” were the most frequent reported, followed by “patients”, “innovative”, “people/persons”.

Similarly, to have a holistic view of the most frequent values mentioned in pharma corporate statements, we performed an overall word cloud of all the values mentioned. Figure 2 illustrates all the words appearing at least twice within company values. The words “innovation” and “integrity” were by far the most common values, followed by “respect”, “ethics”, “responsibility” and “passion”.

A further, in-depth quantitative analysis of the dataset indicated that the themes and concepts associated with patient health, quality of life and their engagement and empowerment were most common, since 89.7% of companies referred to those themes. Similarly frequent was the broad theme of innovation (80.4% of companies). On the other hand, reference to themes related to operational excellence and trust and/or access to drugs was significantly less frequent, being discernible in approximately half of the cases (51.6% and 49.5% respectively).

Lastly, we looked to see whether the sizes of the companies or the geographical location of their HQ could have some influence on the type and focus of the words used (Tab. III). The only significant difference was that larger companies seem to include a vision statement more often than smaller companies (67.4% vs. 41.7%, p = 0.01). For what concerns the geographical location, although some trends were noticeable, there was no clear indication that this per se plays any relevant role, although Japanese companies seem particularly meticulous in indicating a mission (100%) and a vision (83.3%) on their company websites.

Discussion

The main purpose of the pharmaceutical industry is to bring to market drugs and devices that help humans to prevent the occurrence of disease and help patients with acute or chronic diseases to live longer lives and/or experience a better quality of life. A very large number of people are employed by pharma companies and therefore the choice of words in company statements has a direct influence on several million workers worldwide. These two concepts were clearly present in a recent post by Ian Read, Pfizer chairman, in which he stated “The purpose of the pharmaceutical industry is to bring patients innovative new therapies that help them to live longer, healthier lives. That is our reason for existing and is the reason that millions of people come to work for the pharmaceutical industry each day” (6).

Several authors have analysed the content of a mission statement of companies, usually by focussing on specific country such as the United States (7), using parameters such as existential purpose, fundamental values, social responsibility, literary composition and semantic impact, or Italy (8) using the model developed by David (9).

However, the literature on mission, vision and values of pharma companies is relatively scanty (10, 11). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first in-depth analysis performed to collect and cluster the words used by multinational pharma companies when articulating their company statements.

A first analysis of our dataset suggests the possibility to cluster the words into four broad themes/concepts: (1) R&D and Innovation; (2) Value for Patients; (3) Operational Excellence and Trust; (4) Access to Treatment. Not surprisingly, the first two themes were present in the vast majority of company statements (four out of five companies would list either of them), whereas the latter themes were emphasized in only half of company statements. Among company mission and vision statements, “life/lives”, “patients”, “innovative”, “people/persons” were mentioned at least 50 times. On the other hand, words referring to other major healthcare stakeholders appeared very rarely: “professionals” was listed seven times, there was only one mention to “physicians/doctors” and none to “nurses”, “pharmacists” and “payors”. Of note, we did not find any comparative statements (i.e. we are better/larger than our competitors). In fact, when we first started the dataset analysis, we identified one company, Mundipharma, whose tagline was very strongly focussed on competitors and read “we see what others don’t”. However, the statement was recently changed to a simpler, less ambitious, non-comparative statement: “to move medicine forward”.

The lack of focus on the theme of economic and environmental sustainability was somewhat surprising: the term “sustainable” was present only five times and the term “environment” was not used anywhere.

Analysis of the word cloud of the company values indicates that “innovation” and “integrity” are by far the most commonly used words, either of them used in 30 instances or more, with “respect”, “ethics”, “responsibility”, “patient”, “passion” and “team-teamwork” all mentioned in more than 10 instances. It is clear that there is a strong focus towards inward-looking company values while value for the patient, or more generally, the consumer, is somewhat lacking. Overall, the term “innovation” thus emerges as the most quoted word in company statements. On the other hand, words such as “sustainability”, “transparency” and “environment(al)” were rarely mentioned among company values. We expect this to evolve significantly within the next few months/years as sustainable business models, open science, general transparency in business and care for the environment become even more critical for building a strong company reputation on the web.

Conclusions

This dataset represents a baseline reference that can be useful to follow the evolution in the company communication messages, in light of the rapid changes from an M&A, business and scenario perspective.

The results of our analysis indicate that most multinational pharma companies provide comprehensive statements, focussing their vision and mission statements mostly on their innovative R&D approach and their impact on patient prognosis and their quality of life.

However, an in depth analysis of their alignment with key needs and trending topics is warranted to further engage their customers in order to build their reputation index and ultimately their value within the business community.

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the following individuals for identifying companies included in our analysis: Christopher Basset (UK), Juan de La Fuente (Spain and Portugal), Thierry Henane (France), Fabian Kaufmann (Germany).

The authors are also thankful to Eric Merkel Sobotta and Maurizio De Cicco for reviewing the manuscript and sharing very helpful comments.

Disclosures

Financial support: The authors declare no financial support.

Conflict of interest: The authors have no financial disclosures to declare.