Pharmaceutical companies aren’t always known for being the most culturally forward brands, but that’s not the case with Genentech, a member of the Roche Group. The 50 year-old brand is on a mission to put patients, and recently caretakers, at the center of everything and to reach consumers in a modern context.
“When we think about patient-centricity and brand authenticity, we’re not just thinking about the patient,” says Zoë Lazarre, PhD, MPH. “We’re thinking about the holistic environment and community that supports that patient. We’re also thinking about caregivers.”
Lazarre has more than 20 years of experience in health in both the public and private sector. As chief marketing officer (CMO) at Genentech, she is looking at a patient’s journey looking up symptoms late at night on Reddit to Googling or LLMing to come up with a long term care program and trying to understand the best ways to reach customers through engaging content.
“I always want to generate things that are novel and unexpected,” says Lazarre.
Prior to being promoted as CMO, she served as vice president of the Foundational Products Franchise, where she led the U.S. Squad and Network across a 17-product franchise including: immunology, stroke, influenza, and late-stage oncology, with full profit-and-loss responsibility for $6B annual revenue. Dr. Lazarre has previously held board positions on both the UC Berkeley School of Public Health Alumni Board and the San Francisco AIDS Foundation.
Brand Innovators caught up with Lazarre from her office in the Bay Area to discuss how the brand’s mission is showing up in creative 50 years in, her perspective on AI and why they chose to work with Damon Wayans to raise awareness about diabetic macular edema (DME). This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Talk to me about the brand’s mission and how you translate that into the creative that you’re putting out in front of consumers.
This is our 50th anniversary at Genentech. It’s been a tremendous year to celebrate the legacy of medicines that we’ve put out. Genentech’s mission is to discover, to develop, to manufacture and commercialize medicines that transform lives. This year, it’s about getting more medicines to patients faster. The patient has always been at the center, but the role of the patient in healthcare decision-making has changed radically.
When we think about that Genentech mission and how it shows up in our creative, we are more innovative and more patient-centric than we’ve ever been before. We’ve also had several brands issue quite significant caregiver campaigns. It’s an expansion of our mission of patients at the center. Another example is a product finder feature on our website. The best marketing doesn’t result in helping a patient if they can’t find where the product is at their local drug store.
Damon Wayans is a paid spokesperson for Genentech in the “All Eyes on DME” awareness campaign. Can you just talk about the importance of showing up in culture like this?
That’s not something we expect from pharma companies. I’m always pushing our teams to experiment and try things. It’s okay if they don’t work as long as we learn from it and then stop. But this is one where we tried it and it was incredible.
The Damon Wayans work doesn’t center around a celebrity, but it centers around trust. Who were the trusted voices in this instance that resonated with our community? We want to show up authentically in moments and places that matter to our audience and with people that our audience trusted. Damon was the absolute embodiment of that.
We did a lot of work to really understand the audience, like not just the demographics, what motivates them, who inspires them, how they spend their time, what TV shows they watch, whether it’s Saturday Night Live or the local news or Netflix. We want to really understand them and then map those perspectives where they have influence. Culture is really important because if we’re not where the moments in culture are, there’s a disconnect.
Can you talk about how you try to connect to people in a fragmented landscape?
The customer journey has been one of the biggest shifts in the past two years. Your healthcare journey could start late at night on Reddit or it could start LLMing a symptom on Claude or ChatGPT. We show up in the fragmented landscape in a really similar way by figuring out every single detail and starting with the patient and the consumer. Where are their needs? Who’s their community? Who do they trust? How do we create opportunities for better engagement? Then figure out exactly where our consumers, our HR clinicians, our hospitals actually are and we show up there. And so you could say, starting with the end goal of where the patient is and working backwards has been very different than when we set a media plan at the beginning of the year and we distribute through those channels.
We’re constantly changing our media strategy. We can make almost real-time adjustments to media and channels. We have a great media partner that we work with. This is really different from buying your media and it sits for six months. We can measure the impact and the reach of that media in real time. We’re actually leveraging some omni-channel capabilities to think about how this doesn’t become fragmented – very compliantly and, of course, respecting patient privacy. You’re seeing messages which support the entire journey from symptoms to diagnosis, to product acquisition to long-term management and access to reimbursement.
Can you tell me how your past experiences in public health helped shape your current perspective?
I have a master’s and a PhD in public health and health policy and economics. Over 20 years ago, I wrote my dissertation on using financial incentives to impact behavior change. How much would I have to pay someone to stop smoking, lose weight, wear their seatbelt? And we did it in the context of California insurance plans and then broader health policy changes. About 20 years ago workplace wellness programs were just coming into vogue. Now they’re part of our vernacular as employers. But I’m still tackling the same problems of like, how do you incentivize behavior change?
Obviously, we’re not providing a financial incentive, but coming back to this really complex world of what motivates people? What drives preventative healthcare behavior all the way from seeking treatment, to partnering, to making sure you have access? It’s about empowering people. I lectured at UC Berkeley earlier this year and there was a group of public health students who said they didn’t realize how many parallels our mission has in driving public health outcomes. At Genentech with reaching large audiences – everything from top of the funnel disease awareness to all the way of long-term adherence and management throughout that.
My passion is working with communities and bettering public health and that always comes through. Are we making this decision because it betters the patient and the community? Are we reaching the communities not in our data? That mindset permeates how we think about marketing.
What are the big marketing challenges as you look to the second half of the year?
This wouldn’t be an interview without talking about AI but I have a little bit of a different take on the challenge. Everyone is talking about AI for content creation. If you’re not, you should be. We should all be talking about leveraging AI for creating content, but I am far more interested in AI creating connections. The power of AI is actually the underlying data foundations behind all of our work that generates omni-channel execution. The opportunities for us to market and create connections to find patients, make sure that our messages and themes are showing up in the places where our patients are. Some of the more unseen work in AI is to ensure that we have the right data backbone, the right architecture so we’re able to find and leverage all of our content to optimize it to the right patient at the right time. The organizations that you see skate ahead in the next few years will really have mastered AI for creating those connections and that data foundation.
Second, the trend still is in our human people. The antithesis of AI is the trend that our people will always drive our business. I always say to my marketing team, we need really smart, innovative people. We need people that can learn quickly. The trend is how do you continue to grow the best talent and optimize your people and their skills and their passion for the work? AI is like our superpower suits, but the trend is really just making sure my organization is really focused and we have the right people.
