My Neurons Will Atrophy if I Stay in the Pharmaceutical Industry – Brand Management 131
When Veekas Sabnis, a bright B-school graduate in Pharmaceutical Management and my mentee, decided to leave the pharmaceutical industry after three and a half years as a brand manager, many were surprised.
He had a promising career ahead. But Veekas carried a frustration that numbers and designations could not hide.
This Sunday, on 7th June, he was in Ahmedabad. I invited him for dinner at home. And he opened out. It was not a complaint about salary, designation, or workload. It was the cry of an educated mind that feared losing its ability to think.
“I was not using my brains. If I continue like this, my neurons will atrophy.”
Those words stayed with me.
Veekas was not complaining about hard work. He was lamenting the absence of thinking.
Brand plans were prepared on templates designed by external agencies.
Strategic inputs for new launches and mature brands came from one agency.
Promotional materials came from another.
Even the STPs, Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning, the very heart of brand strategy, were outsourced to a third.
The brand manager, who should have been the chief architect of the brand, had gradually become a coordinator of agencies and a reviewer of PowerPoint slides.
Veekas felt that his role demanded activity, but not enough originality; execution, but little imagination. The very intellectual muscles that had been sharpened during his B-school days were slowly being put into hibernation.
He feared that if he continued long enough, he would lose the habit of questioning, analysing and creating.
Perhaps his lament raises an uncomfortable question for the pharmaceutical industry.
If brand managers stop thinking, who will build brands?
And if everyone is merely assembling ideas borrowed from agencies, where will the next generation of brand builders come from?
The story may resonate with many young pharmaceutical marketers who entered the profession to create brands, only to discover that they were increasingly managing vendors instead of exercising their own strategic minds.