Barri Blauvelt Innovara CEO and adjunct faculty at U. of Massachusetts co-authors: Identifying Important Breast Cancer Control Strategies in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East/North Africa has just been published on BMC Health Services Research (http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6963/11/227).

There is a lot of emphasis now in the healthcare industry on the word "access", e.g. creating access, maintain access and crafting access strategies. It slowly crept into our language starting with the new millennium. This decade, "access" is THE buzzword.

"Access" is NOT something that you will not find in text books because it has really been the domain of commercialization strategy in the industry for the last three years. Access is fundamentally who holds the money, because who holds the money holds the power.

The package is one of the most underappreciated marketing tools that companies can use to directly communicate with the patient. With the exception of pills going into a pill bottle, which is unique to the USA, this is your moment to touch and talk to the patient.

There are two "moments of truth" – the sample package and the commercial package. Let's start with the sample package. Some of the most creative sample packaging that we have evaluated doesn't even include active ingredient in it. Shire's patch for ADHD is a great example of that. The doctor would give the patient (or the parents of a child patient) an educational sample package with a placebo patch so they could see what a placebo patch would look like and feel like before they made any mistakes when applying the actual, and very expensive, patch. The doctor also could then demonstrate how to wear the placebo patch and further direct them to the materials inside the sample pack to talk about that medicine.

The term marketing in the pharmaceutical industry is being challenged; it is morphing into commercialization strategies, not just marketing. More and more people are feeling that it is no longer about marketing a brand, it is about marketing a disease.

A client recently said to me, and I agree, "This is the future of marketing. It is not about promoting the brand, it is about promoting the disease and how you're going to be involved in that role of disease management. A company with a clear understanding of how they can help advance the management of a disease, that's the company that's going to win."