Public Likes Pharma: Polls show reputation boost

What a difference a year makes! So much has changed because of the pandemic, and perceptions of certain industries have gotten a big boost along the way. According to NYT Dealbook/Harris Poll research, the pharmaceutical industry – “long maligned for high drug prices and its role in the opioid crisis, benefited most,” reported Callie Schweitzer, senior marketing editor at LinkedIn News.

John Gerzema, CEO of The Harris Poll told Schweitzer, "Public approval, as we know in polling, is fleeting. Very quickly, the goodwill earned can revert to the mean. So the industry must price in the future value of popular opinion into their products. Why have one good year, when many may be possible with a stronger overall industry image to market from?"

Thanks to the speed with which COVID vaccines got approved, Americans who viewed pharma positively went from 32 percent in January 2020 to 62 percent in February 2021. The report made it clear that trust is at the core of corporate reputation: “The traditional drivers of corporate reputation — high-quality products and services, and delivering solid business results — are now simply the price of entry. What differentiates companies and reputations today is a company’s character, all underpinned by trust.”

The special Harris Poll Report, issued on the one-year anniversary of the pandemic, is called “The Great Awakening: A Year in the Life in the Pandemic.” The report “examines the most impactful changes to American society over the last 12 months based off 55 waves of weekly surveys since early March from The Harris Poll COVID-19 Tracker.”

According to the Harris Poll authors, the report examines “loss, resilience and emergence.” The pandemic is changing many aspects of American life that are only now becoming clear. As the report said, “From values and beliefs to routines and relationships, change is underway across the nation. A year’s worth of data on our society reveals new priorities in how we choose to live our lives, where we want to live and work and how we choose to spend our time and money.”

As companies attempt to recover, they have to adapt and evolve. They need to comprehend the evolution of Americans, who are “digitally accelerated, hyper-resourceful and ever-mindful.” The poll predicted that there would be “new winners and losers in a transformed marketplace. But one thing is clear: conventional wisdom and assumptions no longer hold in a post-COVID America.”

The authors of the poll explained that in early March 2020, as America was trying to understand the extent of the pandemic, The Harris Poll started the COVID-19 Tracker to “continuously monitor public sentiment through weekly polling to understand how the virus was reshaping life across the nation.” The weekly polling was performed “as a service to public health and the American public at-large, and soon became a critical resource for journalists, universities, healthcare institutions, and businesses.” Today, the poll has become the single largest comprehensive data set on life during the pandemic.