The “Outsider” Rewiring Pharma Media and Marketing

On first glance, Gozde Dinc comes across as the consummate pharma media and marketing insider. Her industry experience spans four countries—her native Turkey, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States—and a pair of celebrated tenures at Roche and Genentech. In her current role as Genentech’s director, media, strategic partnerships and innovation, digital marketing, she’s an in-demand speaker and panelist. If you ask people in the business whom they credit for the company’s agility and creativity in the digital realm, Dinc’s name is always among the first mentioned.

Yet Dinc says she has felt like an outsider for much of her career, which she attributes in part to her educational background. “I don’t know a lot of computer scientists and engineers in pharma marketing,” she says. “It wound up being right for me.”

Dinc grew up in a town so small that, she recalls, “Even a lot of people in Turkey hadn’t heard of it.” After a short stint working for IBM as a software engineer and technology consultant, she entered the healthcare world as a technology business analyst at Roche.

Dinc’s transition to the marketing side of the industry commenced shortly thereafter. It started with a project that consolidated Roche’s numerous customer-facing websites into a single portal per European region, then grew to include digital transformation in a host of markets across the continent.

“It was a time when everybody was trying to figure out how to do more than just brand-dot-com...