DXY Launches New Brand dmc to Accelerate Enterprise Strategy and Files IPO Prospectus

On November 18, 2021, at the DXY·Dingxiang Doctor Ecosystem Partner Conference held in Shanghai, DXY launched its digital marketing services brand, dmc (DXY Marketing Center), nicknamed “Damai Cha.” Leveraging the dmc brand, DXY will provide digital marketing solutions to pharmaceutical companies and consumer goods enterprises.

Typically, when the industry refers to digital marketing in the pharmaceutical sector, it primarily focuses on prescription drugs. The target audience is physicians, and the services provided include content that reaches doctors, such as virtual representatives and online academic conferences, or content that reaches patients, such as disease management and patient education.

After years of development, DXY has not only reached 2.1 million physician users but also served hundreds of millions of general users, comprising both patients and a large population of health-conscious individuals. The rich resources across both the medical professional and public ends have imbued DMC’s digital marketing services with a distinctive “DXY character,” thereby enabling DXY to deliver greater industry value.

DXY Vice President Chu Yang Launches DMC Brand

At this Partner Conference, DXY announced that its digital marketing services for enterprise clients will operate as an independent brand named “dmc” (DXY Marketing Center), with the nickname “Damai Cha.”

DMC integrates the value of DXY’s two-sided ecosystem for physicians and the general public, establishing an open platform to fully leverage DXY’s strengths in health marketing. It provides professional digital marketing solutions for pharmaceutical companies and consumer goods enterprises, helping to enhance industry efficiency.

“Compared with digital marketing for mass consumer goods, digital marketing for pharmaceuticals differs significantly in terms of direct audience reach and regulatory stringency. However, they also share commonalities; for instance, the demand for product differentiation is becoming increasingly pronounced, and there is a clear trend toward a younger user demographic,” said Lv Yan, General Manager of Digital Marketing at DXY’s Dingxiang Doctor.

DXY DMC Product Tree

In terms of service offerings, DMC can provide enterprises with digital solutions including IP services, content services, channel services, and data tool services.

In terms of target audiences, IP-based services such as DXY Doctor and DXY Mom, content offerings like original columns, and channel services including Official Accounts and Mini Programs primarily serve the general public. DXY Live, industry academic conferences, time-series Official Accounts, and the DXY New Media Matrix mainly target physician users. The DXY Expert Panel leverages physicians to influence the general public. Products such as the Insight Database and the Medical Data Open Platform primarily cater to enterprise clients.

“More than a decade ago, we made small-scale attempts at digital marketing in the pharmaceutical industry, but it was last year’s pandemic that prompted us to make larger-scale investments,” said Li Tiantian, founder of DXY. During the pandemic, various activities such as academic conferences and physician training were moved online. After the situation stabilized, pharmaceutical companies no longer viewed digital marketing merely as an exploratory or novel initiative, but rather as a channel equally important to traditional marketing, with some even regarding it as their primary battlefield.

In July 2020, DXY unveiled its enterprise business strategy: leveraging its extensive accumulated base of resources ranging from physicians to the general public, it aims to help pharmaceutical companies establish a commercialization chain extending from the physician community to the general population, thereby creating a new “B (Pharmaceutical Companies)–D (Physicians)–C (Patients/General Public)” digital ecosystem.

Operating DMC as an independent brand serves as a critical milestone in the strategy implementation process, facilitating the realization of the strategy through more clearly defined product offerings and a more distinctive brand identity.

From Lü Yan’s perspective, the development of digital marketing can be divided into three stages. The first stage involves building digital infrastructure, such as implementing CRM and SaaS systems and establishing official accounts on platforms like WeChat and institutional channels. The second stage focuses on reaching users through digital means, including managing WeChat official accounts and planning and organizing online academic conferences. The third stage entails leveraging data feedback and analysis to generate industry insights and adopt more precise marketing strategies. “The third stage has not yet been fully realized, but the industry has already begun developing these capabilities.”

A review of DXY’s accumulated resources clearly shows that its capabilities on both the physician-facing and public-facing fronts are driving DMC to push digital marketing into a new stage of development.

From the Doctor’s Side: From One-Way Output to Mutual Achievement.

Since its inception, DXY has provided physicians with platforms for literature search and academic exchange. It has subsequently launched tools and platforms such as Drug Assistant, DXY Broadcast, DXY Open Courses, and DXY Talent, to support physicians in enhancing their professional competencies, facilitating academic communication, and advancing career planning and professional growth.

Launched in 2017, the Yinchuan DXY Internet Hospital introduced a new practice model for physicians, providing them with new avenues for legitimate income and accelerating the digitalization of their professional activities. Since 2018, DXY has consecutively released multiple editions of the “China Hospital Compensation Survey Report” and the “China Physician Insights Report.” Through large-scale surveys, these reports reflect the current state of physicians’ work and income, exerting widespread influence within the medical community and fostering a more concrete and realistic understanding of the profession among industry stakeholders and the general public.

While DXY creates value for the medical community, it also receives corresponding feedback. In addition to their daily involvement in producing medical courses and writing and reviewing medical science popularization content for DXY, physicians have provided strong support to the platform during critical periods. Taking the 2020 pandemic as an example, DXY was often able to promptly obtain information and knowledge from the frontline of the anti-epidemic efforts. For instance, it launched exclusive firsthand accounts, such as Yang Yongfeng, Deputy Director of Wuhan Cabin Hospital Ward 2, who shared his frontline work experiences and hand-drew schematic diagrams of the cabin hospital via DXY. Frontline physicians fighting the epidemic leveraged DXY Open Courses to share the latest clinical diagnosis and treatment experiences, explaining the imaging characteristics of COVID-19, as well as treatment protocols for both severe and mild cases.

This also means that the connection between DXY and physicians is not merely a one-way output from the platform to users, but rather a deep, mutually beneficial relationship.

Mass Market: Combining Broad User Coverage with Multi-Dimensional Needs Insights.

Building on its two major intellectual property brands, DXY Doctor and DXY Mom, DXY upgraded its corporate vision, mission, and values in 2019. It repositioned its target users as patients and the general public, aiming to manage chronic and common diseases for patients through online consultations and medical inquiries, while providing professional health knowledge and addressing concerns for the general public through medical science popularization, thereby enhancing their health literacy.

During the 2020 pandemic, DXY launched the world’s first epidemic map. Its timely, comprehensive, and accurate data became a cited source for multiple mainstream media outlets. The platform was subsequently upgraded from a national epidemic map to a global one, accumulating billions of views.

Driven by heightened public awareness of disease prevention and vaccination, DXY launched a vaccine service platform in 2020. Covering hundreds of clinics across 18 cities, the platform provides real-time visibility into non-EPI (Expanded Program on Immunization) vaccine inventory at vaccination sites, while offering authoritative vaccine education, appointment scheduling, and management of post-vaccination adverse reactions.

After one year of operation, DXY’s Vaccine Service Platform has connected 1,000 vaccination sites across 200 cities, cumulatively serving 1 million users. Since November 2021, vaccine services have been integrated into the “Dingxiang Doctor” App, enabling users to access end-to-end services—from vaccine education and online consultations to appointment scheduling and on-site vaccination—directly through the app.

At the conference, DXY Data Research Institute released data insights on health-vulnerable populations based on the “2021 National Health Insight Report,” analyzing the overall health status of the general public as well as their expectations and self-assessments across various health dimensions. Similar to its ongoing monitoring of physician-side data, DXY has made public-side data research a routine practice.

Therefore, from the perspective of its consumer-facing business strategy, DXY shapes its influence by cultivating major intellectual property (IP) and providing authoritative commentary on trending events, thereby reaching a broader audience. It expands its health service offerings through platforms such as vaccine services, while leveraging health data research to gain multidimensional insights into user needs.

In summary, the interaction between DXY and physician users is becoming increasingly in-depth, while its influence and reach among general users continue to expand. The user profiles derived from multi-dimensional health services are also becoming more comprehensive, thereby establishing more precise reference standards for digital marketing. Viewed through the lens of the three-stage framework for digital marketing mentioned by Lü Yan, DMC’s digital marketing efforts are advancing toward the third stage, leveraging these accumulated resources.

A closer look at the current state of the healthcare industry reveals that the implementation of DXY’s aforementioned corporate strategy and DMC brand strategy will demonstrate industry value in two key aspects.

In the field of internet healthcare, empower physicians and collaborate with enterprises to better explore service scenarios at the “upstream” of disease management.

Li Tiantian stated that internet healthcare can not only address “downstream” disease-related issues but also extend to the “upstream” sector to tackle challenges related to healthy lifestyles, offering more diversified solutions. “Upstream” scenarios occur outside hospital settings, encompassing daily life, work, and travel; product demands are diverse, ranging from online consultations and medication purchases to patient education and disease prevention.

In this process, physicians serving patients can also enhance their professional competencies. “Not every physician possesses the skills for online services, nor can all deliver them effectively,” noted Li Tiantian. DXY’s systems—including onboarding training for physicians, peer review, and random quality inspections—have brought professional value to the industry. Meanwhile, serving the public requires the participation of various stakeholders, such as medical institutions, pharmaceutical companies, and consumer goods enterprises, with DXY playing a key role in value integration and ecosystem development.

DMC's product ecosystem serves as an integration tool for the aforementioned services and value.

Redefining the Scope of Digital Marketing in the Pharmaceutical Industry

As stated at the beginning of this article, there is no standard or unified definition of digital marketing in the pharmaceutical industry within the sector. However, most industry professionals believe that pharmaceutical digital marketing primarily focuses on the promotion of prescription drugs, aims to influence physicians’ decision-making, and mainly involves the migration of offline scenarios to online platforms.

Given DXY’s service capabilities and accumulated influence across both healthcare professionals and the general public, digital pharmaceutical marketing has expanded its possibilities: marketing portfolios now encompass not only prescription drugs and over-the-counter (OTC) medications but also consumer health products; marketing efforts can influence physicians’ decision-making, patients’ choices, and even jointly engage physicians to reach health-conscious populations with specific needs; marketing approaches include the digitization of traditional methods such as sales visits and academic conferences, as well as the integration of diverse new media operations and interactive channels. Consequently, DMC is able to serve a broader range of healthcare and medical enterprises.

Of course, in any field, it takes time for the full value of an industry to become apparent. In its exploration of service scenarios “upstream” in disease management, DXY has already seen several products and services deliver impressive data. While digital pharmaceutical marketing is not a new business area, DMC represents a new brand with a more systematic product portfolio. It will be interesting to see what results DMC delivers in the near future.