thought leadership
Return on Relationship: The new currency for power brands
Rodney Sexton, Chief Strategy Officer, Marketing | November 13, 2025
What if we told you the era of transactional brand relationships was dead? And that, in an era of increasing health inequity and direct-to-consumer pricing, distribution, and access models, there’s a better way to build lasting connections with your brands? Discover the value of Return on Relationship and uncover a new methodology built to inject power into your brands.
On May 8, 2020, CMI Media published an article about the shift from traditional marketing in the pharmaceutical industry to emerging customer experience models. Their future-looking conclusion was that everything starts and ends with the customer experience. Even then, they proclaimed omnichannel or marketing automation were insufficient terms and likely insufficient focuses because they do not encompass the complete customer experience.
The article states, “Pharma serves many different customers and providing siloed experiences to different types of customers will one day be obsolete.” That day is today.
Approximately 45,000 Americans of working age die each year because they lack access to healthcare.2 Roughly 8% of US children have no source of care when sick other than a hospital.3 And 92% of Americans failed to receive all recommended, high-priority preventive services, leading to delayed diagnoses, more advanced disease, and greater morbidity and mortality.
More than 4 million Americans are at risk of losing their insurance5, and over 300 rural hospitals are at risk of closing.6 Countless people face rising health insurance premiums that may force them to choose paying for rent and food over health protection due to the expiration of subsidies from the Affordable Care Act. We risk seeing those above statistics and the corresponding outcomes worsen even more.
While we’re still awaiting final disclosure of Most-Favored-Nation pricing demands, we could see improvements in affordability that lead to improvements in outcomes. Some changes in the logistics of healthcare delivery, notably direct-to-consumer pricing, distribution, and access models, will create an opportunity for pharmaceutical manufacturers to formulate closer patient contact than ever before.
However, those changes will only translate into deeper relationships with patients if we communicate differently. If we see patients as peers and equal stakeholders in brand equity, and if we listen. We can achieve this if we replicate the dynamics of human relationships by taking a Return on Relationship approach.
