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This extract is from our recent whitepaper: How Pharma Can Use Behavioral Science to Balance Global Strategy with Local Relevance, which discusses how pharma organizations build solutions that are globally scalable while remaining relevant across different healthcare systems, regulations, and patient populations. Featuring insights from experts from Astellas Pharma, Merz Therapeutics, Novartis, and S3 Connected Health, the whitepaper provides a structured framework for identifying the specific behavioral and environmental variables that justify adaptation, enabling more consistent, evidence-based decision-making across global organizations.
In today's global healthcare landscape, where scientific innovation transcends borders, physicians collaborate internationally, and digital communication enables the rapid sharing of clinical information, product narratives, and patient experiences, achieving global consistency is more important than ever. These factors make aligned strategic narratives and standardized processes that function efficiently across different markets even more important.
At the same time, healthcare delivery remains profoundly local.
While pharma companies operate globally, patient care is delivered within national and regional healthcare systems that differ significantly in structure, incentives, workflows, reimbursement models, regulatory expectations, and operational realities.
This creates a fundamental challenge for pharma organizations: how can they preserve the efficiencies of global scale while remaining relevant within highly variable healthcare environments? And the key is understanding which aspects of healthcare engagement are fundamentally universal and which genuinely require local adaptation.
Building the right organizational model
Successfully navigating this challenge requires the right organizational structure.
A strong global team with clear objectives, KPIs, and direction, bringing a wealth of experience to the table, is the starting point. Over time, global teams develop experience across multiple markets and become better at distinguishing genuinely important local needs from differences that may not require significant adaptation.
Within that strong global team, representatives from major markets should be invited to participate directly in research discussions, strategy development, and the interpretation of insights.
Local affiliates bring valuable expertise because they understand their own markets in depth and bring a detailed understanding of their own healthcare systems, regulations, cultural norms, reimbursement environments, and physician behaviors, but they may not always have visibility into how other markets operate. Global teams, on the other hand, usually have a broader cross-market perspective, but may lack a detailed understanding of local nuances.
The intention is not necessarily to reflect every market perfectly, but rather to ensure that the realities of the most commercially and strategically important markets are embedded in the foundation of the global strategy.
This co-creation approach also delivers organizational benefits beyond strategy development itself. Involving local affiliates early increases engagement, motivation, and alignment because both local and global teams feel they are contributing to a shared process rather than operating in isolation. Affiliates excluded from the design of a global program are far more likely to resist or rebuild it, regardless of its quality.
The goal is disciplined adaptation
Global teams often underestimate how powerful local adaptation can be, while local teams sometimes overestimate how unique their market is. There’s often a belief at the affiliate level that “our country is completely different; a global strategy could never work here.” And while there’s truth in the idea that local nuance matters, the reality lies somewhere in between. Not every global strategy will be relevant in every market, but equally, not every local variation is justified.
Sean Gill, Director of Behavior Science, S3 Connected Health
In practice, while meaningful local nuances certainly exist, many of the underlying clinical challenges, patient needs, and physician behaviors are remarkably consistent across markets. The core questions surrounding diagnosis, treatment initiation, adherence, patient confidence, and long-term disease management often look far more similar than different.
The role of global strategy is therefore to identify these shared patterns and establish a common strategic foundation.
Once this shared core has been established, organizations can then determine where local adaptation genuinely adds value. In practice, this often means distinguishing between non-negotiable global elements and areas where flexibility is appropriate.
Different companies take different approaches to managing this balance. Some operate with highly centralized models in which global strategy and materials are expected to be implemented largely unchanged except where regulation requires adaptation. Others allow greater local autonomy, particularly in markets that were not directly involved in the original co-creation process. In these cases, affiliates may be given more flexibility because there is recognition that certain local realities may not have been fully captured during development.
The key is to avoid either extreme.
The strongest approaches instead combine global scale and consistency with meaningful local participation, creating strategies that are both operationally efficient and grounded in the realities of clinical practice and healthcare delivery.
Ultimately, the objective is not complete standardization or unrestricted localization. The goal is disciplined adaptation: maintaining the scale, efficiency, and consistency of global strategy while enabling targeted flexibility where local variation genuinely improves outcomes.
If you haven’t already, you can access the full whitepaper for the complete insights HERE.
Hear from industry leaders at Astellas Pharma, Merz Therapeutics, Novartis, and S3 Connected Health, as they discuss how pharma organizations build solutions that are globally scalable while remaining relevant across different healthcare systems, regulations, and patient populations.
