Policy  

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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