In our previous article, we learnt about the comprehensive marketing strategy of Coolberg, a premium non-alcoholic Indian beverage brand. In this blog, we shall learn about the detailed marketing strategy of Bayer – the German multinational pharmaceutical company.
The main intention of this case study is to dive deep and understand how Bayer aims to prevent diseases, provide tailored agricultural solutions and keep a competitive price for its products as its marketing strategy.
We are fully aware that the world is online now, especially after the pandemic, and businesses need to have online visibility, and digital marketing is the core of it. The necessity to have internet visibility with the rise of more and more businesses shifting online emphasizes on learning skills such as digital marketing. If you want to learn more about marketing, attend our Free Masterclass on Digital Marketing by Karan Shah, CEO and founder of IIDE.
By the end of this blog, we will learn about the complete marketing strategy of Bayer. But, before delving further, let’s start with the company’s profile, products, audience and online presence.
About Bayer – Company Overview
In the field of pharmaceuticals and life sciences, Bayer is a German multinational corporation. In 1863, Friedrich Bayer and Friedrich Weskott founded Bayer as a partnership in Barmen. Following the Second World War, Bayer was a key player in the post-war Wirtschaftswunder, quickly regaining its position among the world’s largest chemical and pharmaceutical companies. An illuminated version of the logo is a landmark in Leverkusen. The Bayer cross is the company’s corporate logo. It is composed of the words BAYER written vertically and horizontally, sharing the Y.
In 1853, chemist Charles Frederic Gerhardt described acetylsalicylic acid as an important product of Bayer. Some of the products manufactured by the company include plant varieties, fungicides, herbicides, and insecticides. Bayer had gross revenue of €40.15 billion in 2014, of which pharmaceuticals contributed €12.05 billion. Bayer was rated by Standard Ethics Aei in order for it to be included in the Standard Ethics German Index in 2016. According to the rating system, Bayer received an EE-credit rating, the fourth tier on an eight-tier scale. Placed third in the Seed Access Index in 2016.
| CEO | Werner Baumann |
|---|---|
| CMO | N/A |
| Area Served | Worldwide |
| Industry | Life Science, Pharmaceutical, Chemical, Agriculture |
| Market Share/ Revenue | € 44.081 billion |
| Vision | Health for all, Hunger for none |
| Tagline | We want to make lives better |
Marketing Strategy of Bayer
Being a multinational pharmaceutical company whose area of service is worldwide, Bayer needs to plan and execute various marketing strategies. Let’s understand the marketing strategies covering the 4Ps ( product, price, place promotion ) and how Bayer lines up its vision and business strategies with their marketing strategies.
Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning
Bayer being a company serving in the healthcare industry, aims to serve the broader consumer market with the guiding purpose of “Science for a better life”. Market segmentation requires selecting and grouping consumers and how a product can be catered to according to their needs or vice versa. Bayer commands a huge market and it further divides them into smaller groups keeping its consumer demands and consumer behaviour in mind. Usual consumers are those who require medicine, agricultural supplies and research.
Bayer started production more than a hundred years ago. Aspirin is one of its major products and is targeted at those people who require medicine to take care of fever and relieve mild to moderate aches, toothaches, common colds, and headaches. Likewise, Bepanthol, Berocca, Canesten, Claritin, Elevit, Iberogast, MiraLAX, One-A-Day, Rennie, and Yasmin are some of its major products. Distributors looking for such products or general people looking for medicine are their target audience. For example, the target audience for the birth contraceptive pill Yasmin is of age group 15 – 49, mainly focusing on young adults and young girls who do not want pregnancy. Bayer with agricultural products targets agro-based product distributors, scientists, agronomists and farmers.
Bayer positions itself as a sustainable leader in the industry that caters for solutions for agriculture and crop science along with being a trustable global pharma and medicine provider with great qualities and features. Bayer also positions itself as a good workplace for employers which adds to the pharma brands trust factor.
Marketing Campaign
Humanising science marketing campaign
Bayer launched its humanising brand campaign for communication called “ THIS IS WHY WE SCIENCE” in 2019. The campaign enjoyed success in raising its corporate brand awareness. This campaign showcased how Bayer bonds humanity and science to bring improvement to consumers’ lives. The campaign’s success added to overall brand acceptance, brand trust and brand favorability by 9-10%. Bayer rolled out TV advertisements for this campaign via various channels and social media platforms displaying its work, products, services and objectives in its 60 seconds commercials. Bayer even received an award for this campaign at the 2020 Fierce Pharma Marketing awards.
Bayer’s everyday hero campaign for Aspirin
Bayer launched another campaign intending to create awareness to stop heart attacks. The campaign’s tagline includes a common last name “Smith” and inspires people to carry Aspirin to prevent heart attacks.
The campaign initially started in Fort Smith but didn’t stay limited to the place as several commercials and ads were played on TV and Facebook.
This campaign gained popularity as it termed those who carry Aspirin, an American hero along with spreading the word.
Informative social media campaigns
Bayer produces short informative videos and posts them regularly on their social media platforms such as Instagram. These videos are generally interesting and engaging. The short informative videos are about health-related awareness which makes an interesting for social media users to watch, engage and share the video.
These videos are some of their most liked videos and receive a good number of views in a short period.
Social Media Marketing
Bayer maintains a presence on various Social Media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. The maximum number of followers is on LinkedIn with 4.4 million followers as Bayer frequently engages with professional posts on LinkedIn.Facebook has the second highest number of followers with almost 1 million followers, followed by Twitter and Instagram at 160k and 140k followers respectively.
Bayer publishes all kinds of posts ranging from fun content to informative content to corporate news across all of their Social Media accounts.
SEO Strategies
SEO has its own importance in Digital marketing which has no replacement. In general, it is considered that the number of keywords below 500 is bad, above 1,000 is good and above 10,000+ is amazing. We can see that Bayer.com has 203457 organic keywords and it is considered amazing. This suggests that Bayer has a superb SEO strategy in place which is working for them.
The traffic per month is almost 706,000 which is again pretty amazing. These figures suggest that Bayer has a foolproof SEO strategy in place that helps them maintain the brand’s organic SERP results.
Influencer marketing
Bayer usually runs its ads on traditional means of media, that is Bayer usually conducts its marketing campaigns via TV commercials, newspapers and billboards. However, with the shift of marketing media towards social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram Bayer is also running relevant marketing campaigns on their socials in collaboration with many small to large acting and directing names. Bayer recently racked in Denis Vitola who will be looking to grow the role of influencers along with going in-house after years on the agency side.
E-commerce Strategies
When it comes to E-commerce Bayer sells many products directly from their website and there are certain chemical products which Bayer only sells through their website or partner delivery networks. Besides, Bayer also lists and sells everyday products for healthcare and CropScience-related products on E-commerce platforms like Amazon, Flipkart, Pharmeasy, Netmeds, AgroStar, etc.
Bayer Mobile Apps
Bayer CropScience is an app from Bayer available on both the play store for Android and Appstore on Ios. Bayer CropScience is a utility and solution app for agriculture.
Content Marketing Strategies
Bayer has active social media pages on all major social media platforms. They post content related to their new products and existing product lines along with informative content related to health and agriculture. Their content is posted with nice colour palettes and engaging blogs.
They post content which is professional and informative usually on LinkedIn and Twitter. While the content which is fun, engaging and raises awareness is posted on Instagram and Facebook with short videos and creative posts.
They also use their global and regional websites for content marketing where they post blog content and videos discussing their recent programs, impacts and industry-related awareness.
This ends with an elaborative marketing strategy of Bayer. Let us conclude our learning below from the marketing strategy of Bayer.
Conclusion – What’s Unique in Bayer marketing?
Bayer holds a reputation for being one of the oldest and most prominent Pharmaceutical and Chemical companies in the world. They introduced groundbreaking consumer products such as Aspirin and even Heroin. With its history of more than 120 years, Bayer has had its fair share of controversy and appreciation ranging from war to healthcare.
They market their mission with the tagline “Science for a better life” and run ads where they display the humane aspect of healthcare and chemical science. These marketing strategies position Bayer as trustworthy.
Like Bayer, every big corporate or individual is trying to increase its digital foothold. It is 2022 and digital marketing is a must for any business, content creator or service provider to market their brand. The importance of digital is only increasing with more and more businesses shifting online after the pandemic.
Digital marketing is crucial since it links a company with its clients when they are online and is effective across all sectors. It links businesses with ideal consumers through SEO and PPC on Google, social media marketing, and email marketing. If you would like to learn more and develop skills, check out IIDE’s 4-Month Digital Marketing Course to learn more.
Alternatively, you can enrol in one of our free online masterclasses led by IIDE’s CEO, Karan Shah, to gain insight into the field of digital marketing.
We hope this blog on the marketing strategy of Bayer has given you a good insight into the company’s marketing strategies.
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