Rethinking pharmaceutical marketing for healthcare professionals – from restaurants to coffee shops: how to respect attention and improve impact
9 September 2025 | 8 mins
Why the restaurant model fails
It is a disturbing fact that healthy life expectancy is worse now than it was 10 years ago.¹ A large contributing factor is down to healthcare professionals (HCPs) being under too much pressure due to, among other things, staff shortages and increased patient numbers. Much of today’s pharmaceutical marketing, medical education, and disease awareness activity still follows what might be called the ‘restaurant model’ – attract HCPs to your website, sit them down, and serve a multi-course meal of content in the hope they linger and consume as much as possible.
But HCPs do not have time for restaurants. Their working lives demand the ‘coffee shop model’: step in, grab exactly what they need, quickly and conveniently, before carrying on with their day.
For HCPs, the most effective communication is like a perfectly made espresso: concentrated, energising, and its impact is felt immediately. Campaigns that fail to respect this reality are ignored, no matter how carefully designed.
How PIRL® helps: P&P’s proprietary AI tool PIRL identifies which formats and touchpoints truly deliver the ‘espresso shot’ of value. Its Resonance report highlights where your communication cuts through and where it wastes HCPs’ precious time.
The reality of an HCP’s working day
Healthcare professionals operate under extraordinary pressure. A GP in the UK may see 30-45 patients a day, with hours of paperwork afterwards.² Nurses frequently skip meals or bathroom breaks during 12-hour shifts.³ Consultants juggle patient lists, supervision, urgent queries, and managerial responsibilities.
Take a dermatologist we spoke to recently: she arrived at work at 7am to finish the previous day’s admin, only to find her waiting room already full by 8.15am. By lunchtime she had seen 15 patients, supervised colleagues, consulted online platforms and still had not eaten. Or consider a pathologist who, after a day of finance meetings, urgent biopsies and job planning disputes, was still dictating pathology diagnosis reports at 7.00pm and answering emails close to midnight.
This is the lived reality into which pharmaceutical marketing lands. Campaigns that assume HCPs can spend 10-15 minutes browsing a website are out of step with the actual pressures of clinical life.
How PIRL helps: Audience breakthrough reports capture these adoption drivers and barriers, providing empathy-level insight into how content fits (or fails to fit) into real workflows.
The cost of attention
People only have so much mental bandwidth to give away. With all of the demands on their time, HCPs have very little capacity left. In 2024, 62% of nurses reported burnout,³ and in 2023, 45.2% of US physicians had at least one burnout symptom.⁴
By mid-morning, many HCPs are already cognitively depleted. The dermatologist described headaches before 9.00am. The pathologist admitted skipping lunch to make shuttle bus journeys to attend long multidisciplinary team meetings.
For marketers, the question is stark: what earns the right to interrupt the day of someone already at breaking point? The answer lies in brevity and utility. Research shows HCPs prefer concise, mobile-friendly formats – short guideline summaries, brief webinars, and downloadable resources that fit into fragmented moments.⁵
How PIRL helps: Omnichannel planning booster projects recalibrate campaigns in weeks, ensuring the right content strategy that allows channels to grab the audience’s attention.
The flood of information
The amount of medical information now doubles every 73 days. In oncology or cardiology, this translates into hundreds of new studies each month. No clinician can keep up. In one survey, 82% of physicians admitted that fewer than half the studies they read changed the way they practiced.⁶
Our dermatologist described abandoning official platforms when they were too dense and instead turning to her WhatsApp group for rapid peer advice. The pathologist routinely looks up reference guides between urgent cases, knowing she could not process entire studies during her working day.
This is why ‘content dumping’ fails. More is not better. The only material that earns attention during the working day is easily accessible, summarised content that is relevant to clinical practice there and then.
How PIRL helps: Messaging workshops to derive unique insights that create more succinct, evidence-based narratives that HCPs can absorb in minutes, or even seconds.
Digital habits and omnichannel realities
HCPs are heavy digital users – but selectively. They rely on smartphones for looking things up, spend ~3.6 hours a day on devices,⁷ and almost universally access guidelines online. Platforms like UpToDate, Medscape and BMJ Best Practice are woven into clinical decision-making.
Yet digital fatigue is real. After spending hours on electronic records and messages, few want to trawl through brand websites in the evening. Instead, they seek bite-sized formats that fit seamlessly into their workflow.
The PM Live omnichannel report makes a crucial point: omnichannel succeeds only when channels are orchestrated around the HCP’s agenda, not the brand’s.⁸ Too often, pharma confuses multi-channel with omnichannel, creating noise rather than clarity.
P&P’s four-part discipline provides a practical filter:
Earn attention
Gain engagement
Meet the audience’s agenda
Create belief
How PIRL helps: Audience segment mapping ensures targeting precision, showing when and where to deploy each channel for maximum resonance.
Education versus time
HCPs value continuous education deeply. Over 70% of young oncologists in Europe reported burnout, citing the struggle to stay current.⁹ Yet 94% of UK GPs reported accessing guidelines online every month.¹⁰ The paradox: high demand for knowledge, but no time to engage with it.
The dermatologist we interviewed added research papers to her ‘weekend reading list’ because she could not tackle them mid-week. The pathologist described evening reference checks on complex cases.
The lesson is clear: education must respect both the scarcity of time and the diminished cognitive energy of tired healthcare professionals. The most effective campaigns combine brevity with depth: delivering the essential insight in two minutes, while providing optional links for deeper engagement.
How PIRL helps: Readiness mapping identifies when HCPs are most open to engagement, ensuring resources are deployed when they can have the greatest effect.
Respecting the patient agenda
Every minute an HCP spends with a website is a minute not spent with a patient. A US study calculated that a GP would need 26.7 hours per day to deliver all recommended care.¹¹ Clearly impossible.
Campaigns that understand this reality – offering patient-facing tools, quick reference prescribing guides, or communication aids for shared decision-making – are valued precisely because they save time in consultations and improve outcomes.
The dermatologist said she wanted ‘dinner and a good night’s sleep’ instead of an evening of socialising. The pathologist admitted feeling guilty about calling a nephrologist late in the day, even when it meant saving a recently transplanted kidney. These accounts highlight the moral pressure HCPs face daily. Marketing that lightens this load, even slightly, is vital.
How PIRL helps: By combining insights across all six offerings – Resonance report, Audience breakthrough, Omnichannel planning booster, Messaging workshop, Audience segment mapping, and Readiness mapping – PIRL ensures campaigns respect HCP time while enhancing patient care.
Practical advice – the five step P&P approach
Execution matters as much as strategy. P&P’s five step approach provides the rigour, accountability and agility needed to deliver effective campaigns under real-world constraints.
1. Request for brief
• Collaborative template aligns agency and client from the outset.
• Clear scope, costs and timelines signed off at senior level.
• Transparent resource tracking prevents drift.
2. Define strategy and concepts
• Early development of platforms and creative concepts.
• Iterative testing with stakeholders to refine ideas.
• Final strategy approved with confidence.
3. Develop copy
• Structured content planning and drafting against approved outlines.
• Rigorous review cycles for accuracy and clarity.
4. Develop design
• Approved copy brought to life through compliant design.
• Full offline and Veeva reviews ensure robustness.
5. Delivery and analysis
• Artwork delivered in the correct formats, on time.
• Impact tested against KPIs; learnings fed back for continuous improvement.
This disciplined process ensures campaigns are not only strategically sound but practically deliverable – fast, accurate, and responsive to HCP realities.
How PIRL helps: PIRL strengthens each stage – from Resonance reports validating creative cut-through, to Readiness mapping guiding launch timing. The result: work that consistently earns attention, fits HCP routines, and improves patient care.
Conclusion – from restaurant to coffee shop
Pharmaceutical marketing must evolve from the restaurant model to the coffee shop model – from holding attention, to giving it back.
The day-to-day lives of healthcare professionals – the dermatologist rushing through 15 patients without a break, the pathologist still working at 11pm, the nurse skipping meals during 12-hour shifts – leave little room for indulgent content experiences.
The future lies in campaigns that respect attention, deliver rapid utility, and align with the discipline of earning attention, gaining engagement, meeting the agenda, and creating belief.
With PIRL, P&P can map these realities, test them against data, and design campaigns that genuinely fit the lives of HCPs.
If you want to create marketing, medical education and disease awareness material that works for HCPs and for their patients, it is time to think less like a restaurant, and more like a coffee shop.
If you would like to discuss any of the above, or help to ensure your campaign is as effective as possible, please contact bronwen.andrews@pageandpage.uk.com
REFERENCES