Media relations increasingly important to medical device companies
8 June 2006 Cologne, Germany. Professional communications and media
relations are becoming increasingly essential to medical device companies.
Ninety percent of companies say that the importance of communications is
growing, or even growing significantly. It is also clear that patients will
become a more important target group and that as a result language used by
companies needs to be simplified. These are the results of a detailed online
survey carried out by the German Medical Technology Association, BVMed, in
which 90 companies from the medical technology sector participated. BVMed
published the results of the survey at the “Medical Technology
Communications Congress” on 30 and 31 May 2006 in Cologne with some 140
participants from medtech companies, media and agencies. However, the
survey results also highlighted deficiencies in how medical technology
companies manage communications. For example, barely a quarter (23.6%) of
companies have a designated communications department. In about half of the
companies (47.2%), responsibility for communications is placed with the
marketing department. 20.2% of companies participating in the questionnaire
have an administrative department with a direct link to the management
board. In 12.4% of companies the management board is itself responsible for
communications. Two-thirds of the 90 companies that participated in the
survey work with PR agencies and 25% of them with actually more than one
agency. In these cases, the most important factors for companies are that
the service provider puts forward convincing concepts and has a specialized
knowledge of the sector. The actual work carried out by PR agencies was
considered average and was awarded a “C” grade. A further survey
concerning the use of TV and radio showed that two-thirds of the
participating companies set great value by film material for the medtech
sector.
Detailed results of the survey on the importance of communications in the
medtech sector can be requested from the BVMed press office
(beeres@bvmed.de ).
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