Merck: Case Study: The Global Company

Part 1: Company Presentation

1.1. The Global Company
Founded in 1668 in Darmstadt (Germany) by Friedrich Jacob Merck, Merck is the oldest chemical and pharmaceutical company in the world.

Today, Merck’s family hold 70% of company’s parts; the remaining 30% are publicly traded, taken by shareholders.

In 2013, the turnover was 10.7 billion euros. Merck, proud of its values, puts innovation at the heart of its culture by investing last year 2 billion euros in the research and development sector.

In 350 years, the company has become a global entity with more than 50,000 employees in 66 countries, united by the desire to create new technologies in a world that is evolving faster and faster.

The company is internationally known as Merck,

- Integrity, because it ensures the credibility of the company.
- Transparency, because it makes mutual trust possible.

1.2. Life Science Division

In 2010, Millipore, specialized in filtration, was bought out by Merck, becoming its subsidiary named Merck Millipore.

The Merck Life Science division includes products and services that help pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies to develop and produce medicines safely, efficiently and cost-effectively.

The Life science division comprises 3 sectors:

- Research solutions: this organization develops tools and reagents for scientific research and the discovery of new drugs. Its highly competitive market is oriented towards the academic sector and medical research.

- Process solutions: supports the pharmaceutical industry in the production of medicines during the clinical trials phase until their commercialization. Process Solutions offers large-scale production tools as well as high quality raw materials for the production of chemical or biotechnological drugs, vaccines such as cell and gene therapy products.

- Applied solutions: complements Merck Life Science 's offer in the field of laboratory and quality control of drugs and their production

The first objective of a BtoB digital strategy is awareness (recognition of the brand) through the visibility of the company on search engines such Google, of its websites and of its social media (Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook). The second objective is the lead generation, namely to generate a buying opportunity.
In the pharmaceutical sector, it is a matter of demonstrating its expertise to customers and especially to prospects. Social media has a key role to play in ensuring these goals. Indeed, the goal is to be visible on the internet. Nowadays, we use the internet as soon as we do research. Being visible on the internet increase the probability of gaining market share, therefore it should be a major challenge for companies. For example, by buying keywords on Google, the company can appear in the first search results and position itself as a leader.
The use of social networks helps to show the areas of expertise of the company, to create and retain a community as well as to communicate on the new products and services. The more a company is active on the Internet, the more likely it is to appear in the first search results and thus generate a buying