New chief strategy officer for Merkle

Merkle (www.merkleinc.com), one of the nation’s largest and fastest growing database marketing agencies, announced the appointment of Vice President Pete Mehr, Ph.D., as chief strategy officer to its growing healthcare marketing practice, which launched earlier this year to provide data-driven marketing insight and strategy to leading healthcare and pharmaceutical clients. As chief strategy officer, Mehr will develop and oversee the execution of physician relationship marketing programs, consumer/patient relationship marketing programs, promotion “media mix” allocation approaches and market research initiatives for Merkle’s clients.

In this role, Mehr will partner with Jeff Wiltrout, Ph.D., who is vice president and general manager of Merkle’s healthcare practice. Mehr and Wiltrout, a 15-year healthcare marketing veteran, will collaborate to ensure that the vision and strategy developed for each client is successfully delivered via Merkle’s client teams.

Mehr first joined Merkle in April 2006, and served as vice president and client team leader for some of Merkle’s largest accounts. More recently, Mehr’s efforts in defining Merkle’s go-to-market pharmaceutical strategy, analytical capabilities and client teams resulted in the agency’s successful entry into the sector in 2008 with several key account wins. Mehr’s extensive experience and deep pharmaceutical industry knowledge stem from more than 12 years in senior-level sales and marketing management consulting roles with the top 20 pharmaceutical and biotech companies.

“It is my goal to continue to bring innovative solutions to the pharmaceutical marketplace by integrating best practices and pioneering thinking from other vertical markets with our staff’s deep knowledge of the pharmaceutical sector,” Mehr said. “We are seeing increasing interest among pharma companies for highly focused quantitative marketing programs, and there is an urgency to evolve from what has been a traditionally brand-centric approach to a customer-centric business model.”

Jeff Wiltrout, Vice President and General Manager of Merkle’s healthcare practice, said, “We are very fortunate to have Pete Mehr as our chief strategy officer. Pete is an extremely talented and experienced leader, and his work is quickly establishing Merkle as the relationship marketing partner of choice for leading pharmaceutical companies. His appointment comes at a time in which the pharmaceutical sector is recognizing that new customer-centric marketing approaches rooted in insight and analytics are critical to achieving continued return on investment.”

www.merkleinc.com