Medical marketing teams depend on commercial reprints and ePrints of relevant journal articles to create awareness of the therapeutic areas and brands they manage. Team members work in fast-paced environments without a long lead-time to order reprints once an article is made available. As a result, they don’t often have time to consider that colleagues across the globe, or sometimes in their own office, may be seeking copies of the same articles at the exact same time.
It makes sense that team members working within the same product and therapeutic areas, and executing shared global marketing and brand awareness strategies, would be interested in obtaining, reprinting, and distributing the same articles.
While this common scenario isn’t surprising, what may be surprising is the potential cost savings that these users and their companies can achieve by coordinating reprint orders to take advantage of bulk pricing incentives offered by publishers rather than placing individual orders.
Reprints: One Article, One Company, Many Requests
During a recent week, we received three requests for reprints of the very same article by three different offices of one company.
We reached out to all three to let them know they could probably save money if they could confirm their orders by an agreed upon date. We could then combine the three orders into one and distribute and bill to each affiliate as requested. By combining the orders, the unit cost offered by the publisher was considerably lower and the total savings for the company jumped into the thousands.
This was just one article. Imagine if this could happen multiple times a year? Or even, if it could happen every time the team requested an article reprint?
Six-Figure Savings for a Global Pharmaceutical Company
One of our global pharmaceutical customers recognized this pattern and benefited from significant cost savings for his company by coordinating reprints orders amongst their globally diverse teams.
The initiative was led by an administrator at the pharmaceutical company responsible for global sourcing. His knowledge of the global brand teams enabled the company to coordinate reprints orders within the company’s product groups and therapeutic areas worldwide. Now when an article of interest to the company is published, CCC’s reprints team alerts users in the relevant groups and offers them the opportunity to join a group purchase. Once each office confirms their desired order quantity and shipping and billing requirements, CCC’s team manages the production and distribution, seeing the reprints order through to completion.
This initiative has been very successful for the company, allowing the organization to order more reprints while staying under budget. As a result of this coordination and pricing incentives offered by publishers, the company saved nearly $300,000 annually.
Proactive, Personalized Service that Saves Time and Delivers Savings
In partnership with the client, CCC’s reprints team can help coordinate outreach across global affiliates to secure article reprints. This frees individual brand managers of the time-consuming tasks of identifying, procuring, tracking and organizing reprints content.
The takeaway is that an article of interest to one marketer in a single office may be relevant to other marketing team members across the pond or across the office. Regardless of the location, combining orders is an easy way to save companies money and time.