For Bayer being sustainable in global health is about transparency and honesty. Our next 10 years will focus heavily on honest marketing and clearly indicating side effects of medication.
As well as Bayer’s commitment to meeting standards set by external regulations and codes of practices, the company has its own specific principles for ethical sales and marketing practices regulated by The Bayer Corporate Compliance Policy to ensure transparency. This system facilitates both internal and external complaints to be registered and investigated to ensure compliance to their responsible marketing principles. The Corporate Policy “Responsible Marketing & Sales” states their 3 main focuses for responsible marketing in line with all stakeholder groups.
These points underpin Bayer’s value of Integrity in its marketing ethics which forms part of the company’s 4-part corporate values acronym, LIFE - alongside Leadership, Flexibility and Efficiency.
It would be beneficial to see examples of the company’s “Responsible Marketing and Sales” principles in practice. The company already has a fairly good reputation in this area but stakeholders and critics are wary of the company greenwashing the newly acquired Monsanto business. There have also been claims of greenwashing and spreading of misleading information within the general company, prior to Monsanto, in attempts to promote the company’s sustainability portfolio. Bayer hosted a Pollinator Week event to help combat pollinator declines despite being the leading producer of neonicotinoid pesticides which are a key driver of pollinator declines. The Pesticide Action Network called this a “prime example of greenwashing”.
The company needs to ensure the message is conveyed that their strategies have positive intentions and are not distractions. This will be credible with greater commitment to their resolutions.
In future, the company’s press release will better represent their ethical marketing through articles and analyses to explain their strategy. This should solidify their stance on transparency and integrity.
Bayer’s mission: Science for A Better Life - summarises its aim is to create medicines to improve people’s quality of life. The company views patient safety as “more than just an obligation” but as their commitment to good medicine. In clinical trials, research on people is conducted according to the highest medical, scientific and ethical principles. Bayer takes pride in adhering to strict international guidelines and quality standards as well as current national laws and regulations to produce safe products.
More than 1000 pharmacovigilance experts audit the safety of the products throughout their whole life cycle. As well as continuous assessment, Bayer relies on individual feedback from patients and doctors.
To convey some of this safety information to patients, Bayer has created some simple cartoon videos to explain medical information without jargon and ensure that transparency and reassurance can be achieved whilst avoiding the barriers of intimidating technical language. There is also a simple online procedure available on the Bayer website for reporting adverse events
Criticisms can be seen in the media and among consumers leading to losses in investor confidence and ultimately has an impact on economic sustainability. Netflix released a documentary - The Bleeding Edge - which caused a stir within the medical-device industry, and particularly Bayer’s healthcare division. It has been said to be responsible for unleashing an avalanche of claims against Bayer leading to significant company litigation expenses. They responded with a comprehensive “Fact Check” article to ensure that the safety profile of the product remains positive. They also face major claims against Xarelto - a drug designed to treat and prevent blood clots, as well as antibiotic medications, Cipro and Avelox.
Moving forward Bayer will continue to counter the risk of unexpected side effects by ensuring pharmacovigilance. In addition the company will optimize social media engagement to enhance the feedback loop and prevent expensive investigations into product safety.
Estimates show that in 2018 there were 2.77 billion social network users globally and this is expected to rise to 3.02 billion by 2021. It is possible for Bayer to use an effective social media strategy to promote a positive brand image and encourage a two-way conversation between us and our stakeholders. Bayer has a Youtube channel (19.3k subscribers), Instagram (48.1k subscribers), and Facebook (2.7M followers) presence. Despite these numbers, explanatory videos such as “Pharmacovigilance - You can improve patient safety” only has 630 views. The video expresses the importance of and how to report side effects to benefit overall patient safety. Feedback is essential for our product analyses and helps us to improve medication and avoid unexpected side effects.
Our strategy for overcoming any barriers to creating the safest products is to create and better promote an engaging video series explaining the science behind all of our products including safety. It will signpost viewers to detailed reports about the product’s safety as well as how to report them. We will need to be careful about potentially spreading fear amongst customers regarding harmful but rare side effects as this may have a negative impact on sales.
