Regional Marketing: The Department Medical-Aesthetics Companies Should Abolish First

A few days ago a friend at a high-end clinic group came to me exasperated: she genuinely cannot understand why a “regional marketing department” exists in this industry at all.

She said: I have put up with this for too long. Why do manufacturers in this industry have a department called regional marketing? These people understand neither how a clinic event works nor how to plan one. They have no sense of brand aesthetics. And when it comes to briefing an event supplier they are amateurs directing from the outside.

Experienced brand and marketing people inside clinics are driven to distraction by them — and have no way to tell the manufacturer.

It is not only co-branded clinic events. Plenty of regional events the companies run themselves are also led by regional marketing, with wildly variable results.

Her question was: what is your central marketing department actually for, and why is it not doing this?

As someone who spent years in management upstream, that landed hard.

The problem with regional marketing is one of those management bugs I lived inside for years and could not say out loud.

Now I can state it plainly: in medical aesthetics, a regional marketing department should not exist.

To understand why it appeared, you have to go back to its previous life — the healthcare industry.

At large pharmaceutical companies, the regional marketing role is an extension of scientific promotion. It owns regional market strategy, the delivery of scientific programmes, KOL management, sales training and budget use. Its essence is using scientific influence to drive product share.

And yet even multinational device companies like Johnson & Johnson and Baxter do not have a regional marketing department.

In healthcare, a regional marketing manager is usually required to have a medical or pharmaceutical background, understand evidence-based medicine, be able to do data analysis and hold a conversation with an expert. Add the well-developed training systems of multinational pharma, and the role has a clear talent pipeline and progression path.

As more and more healthcare executives moved into medical aesthetics, they brought that model with them — and more and more small and mid-sized companies followed suit.

But an orange grown south of the Huai is a different fruit north of it. Transplanted bodily into this industry, the concept changed flavour.

Set aside for a moment how requirements change with scale, and the careful arithmetic of headcount efficiency. Look only at the contradiction between the function and the talent model.

In medical-aesthetics companies, regional marketing leans toward channel development and sales support. The job description usually lists:

In practice, the hiring criteria for regional marketing contain almost no hard requirements. What is actually looked for is a sales background or clinic experience, decent communication skills, good presentation, some industry experience. Market analysis, event planning, brand judgement, marketing capability — the things the function is nominally about — are effectively absent.

Most regional marketing manager roles have become a safe harbour for sales, or a waystation on the route to central marketing.

Put bluntly, it is a role that this industry has “localised”. The shell that once carried scientific promotion has been stuffed with sales targets and the execution of market-facing promotional activity.

Capabilities sales should have are stripped away. Product training, event planning, data analysis, clinic strategy — all handed to regional marketing. The result? Sales gradually retains nothing but relationships, with the professional fundamentals gone.

At a company like Johnson & Johnson Medical, our salespeople had to play several roles at once: cover the clinics, run the events, carry the collateral without complaint. At the end of a day of calls you went back to the office to analyse regional promotional strategy, talk it through with marketing and request resources.

Our medical-aesthetics salespeople today have full support from regional medical affairs and regional marketing and, riding the industry’s rapid growth, have advanced through promotions and job moves at an astonishing pace. But the missing underlying capability — hollow management — is being exposed now that the industry is in winter.

Meanwhile regional marketing staff have had essentially no professional training for the role, and in practice have neither a good learning environment nor guidance. Their development path is constrained and they are lost themselves. A small number make it into central marketing on the back of some accident of circumstance — which only shows that owners and management have an unclear picture of what a central marketing management role actually requires.

The brand strategy, product positioning, VI, messaging and event logic that central marketing built get deformed once they reach the region. Every territory adds something of its own, suppliers do as they please, and execution comes out in every conceivable shape.

What the market sees is inconsistent collateral, unprofessional events and inconsistent brand language. That damages brand equity — and it drains clinics’ confidence in the brand.

Healthcare, relatively speaking, does not have much consumer-facing brand strategy. Medical aesthetics does, and it matters. I asked several friends working in fashion, consumer goods and luxury: none of them has a regional marketing department. All store events are run hands-on by a brand manager or event manager from central marketing where the store is owned, and where it is franchised, central is still deeply involved and strictly controls quality.

Devolving brand strategy authority and supplier management wholesale, the way this industry does, strikes them as unthinkable.

Wedged between sales and marketing, regional marketing is essentially a product of splitting authority and resources.

Sales has always wanted to allocate regional marketing’s resources itself, independently, free of central marketing’s strategic constraints. In this industry, regional marketing reports to sales at some companies and to marketing at others; some dress it up as dual reporting; at some it nominally reports to marketing while every hire is recommended by sales. Regional marketing becomes the terrain on which sales and marketing manoeuvre against each other.

The net result: the company carries an extra layer of people that creates no new value while weakening two departments that ought to be stronger. It is a textbook false increment — funded, but building no barrier. No value, and yet another layer of hierarchy.

Almost every company in this industry is still small or mid-sized. A structure like this damages both talent development and the quality and efficiency of the business.

The value most often claimed for regional marketing is that it is closer to the ground, more flexible, and quicker to support sales.

But the logic contradicts itself:

If sales travels light — someone else does the training, someone else plans the events, someone else does the analysis, and they handle only the relationship — then over time sales’ muscles atrophy while regional marketing never grows a brain. Where does sales capability get built?

Sales’ value lies in covering ground, in relationships, in growing the business. But that has never meant sales can only maintain relationships. A genuinely competitive salesperson can cover ground, can present, and can plan.

Cover ground: open up the market proactively and understand the territory.

Present: deliver competent product training or strategy sessions to clinics. Beyond discussing volume with clinic customers, be able to discuss marketing investment and joint activity.

Plan: build a tailored promotional plan for the clinics they own, with a grasp of basic data analysis.

Central marketing, meanwhile, should own brand strategy, toolkit production, the overall activity plan and the supplier system. Its position is the hub, ensuring brand consistency and professional standards actually land.

And if regional marketing really can do both strategy and delivery, is central marketing then free to be an absentee landlord?

Central marketing can have roles that own brand and product activity, coordinating inside the department, working hard, going right to the front line, landing central strategy alongside sales and customers, controlling quality, listening to feedback and improving quickly.

That arrangement is also better for marketing people’s own growth.

Once sales and central marketing each occupy their proper capability model, the organisation runs cleanly: sales owns the touchpoints, marketing owns the system. Rather than forcing a pseudo-marketing department in between and weakening both.

If both sides need an additional layer just to complete their own work, organisational efficiency will only keep falling — and revenue per head with it.

Salespeople in this industry have to recover the ability to present, to set strategy, to plan events and to analyse. This is the necessary path to becoming a regional head or national sales director. Without that training, even someone who reaches a business-lead role stays at the level of a relationship manager — unable to work out a basic bonus policy or a target allocation. Is that phenomenon rare in this industry today?

Product positioning and messaging, resource allocation strategy, budget allocation, brand strategy, VI, event planning and supplier management should all be controlled centrally. Bear in mind that even the best strategy accounts for only 50% of the effect on the business; the other 50% is execution.

Only with clear responsibilities, and strategy bound tightly to delivery, can the brand and product message reach the market clearly and consistently.

Regional marketing is essentially a duplicated role. It carves out responsibilities that belong with sales and marketing without generating new value. Abolishing it makes the organisation leaner and more efficient.

Especially in this winter of iteration, while we are cutting costs hard and slashing event budgets and marketing investment, we should also look inward — strengthen the core capabilities of sales and marketing, and eliminate organisational redundancy.

Someone will ask: what about a new product launch? What about cross-territory events?

In certain exceptional phases — a launch, a cross-regional programme — you genuinely may need extra hands to execute. That is not the same as maintaining a permanent regional marketing department.

It can be handled perfectly well with project teams and a pool of event managers.

New product? Stand up a dedicated task force, with management on the ground too.

Regional event? Draw on the national supplier pool, to a single standard.

A need arises? Sales analyses the market potential themselves, requests the resource, and owns the review and the feedback.

By comparison, a permanent regional marketing department scratches at the problem through the boot. It does not solve the underlying issue, and it adds communication cost, reduces efficiency and distorts execution.

By the same logic, any company still recruiting regional marketing people in volume certainly has multiple problems in its sales and marketing capability models.

Regional marketing is a misplaced artefact in this industry.

It set out to support sales, and hollowed sales out;

It set out to supplement marketing, and fractured marketing;

It set out to improve efficiency, and manufactured redundancy.

The value of an organisation is not in maintaining one more department. It is in putting each capability where it belongs.

Sales needs to grow its muscles back;

Marketing needs to connect the hub to the front line;

Brand needs to stay unified and professional.

In an industry winter, with belts being tightened,

regional marketing is the department medical-aesthetics companies should abolish first.