When a pharma collateral gets stuck in the review cycle, most people assume the issue is medical accuracy. A claim the data cannot support. An MOA description that oversimplifies the mechanism. A comparison with a competitor that the referenced study does not actually justify.
Those issues do come up. But they are not the primary reason collaterals get delayed.
The real reasons collaterals get flagged
The most common flags are far more basic. A claim in the body text references a study, but the superscript linking the claim to the reference list is missing. A comparison chart makes a strong statement, but the footnote clarifying the study design is absent. A disclaimer is present but the font size or placement does not meet the applicable regulatory guideline. A generic name is incomplete. An ABPI section exists but does not cover the latest safety update.
These are not complex scientific disputes. They are simple, avoidable oversights. The kind that make the brand manager think, how did we miss this? And yet they show up cycle after cycle, across companies, across therapy areas, across experience levels.
The reason is not carelessness. It is workload.
Why the brand manager cannot be the quality checker
In most Indian pharma companies, the brand manager does not just create the collateral. The brand manager is also responsible for verifying that it is correct before it moves forward. There is no separate quality check layer. No pre-flight review. The person who builds the collateral is the same person who is supposed to catch the gaps in it.
The brand manager creates the collateral with the creative agency or the in-house design team. The GPM or marketing manager reviews it and sends it back with corrections. Sometimes two or three rounds of internal back and forth happen before the collateral is considered ready for medical review.
The medical review back-and-forth
And this is where the real back and forth begins. Medical says a particular claim is not adequately supported. Marketing says the data exists. Medical asks for the specific reference. Marketing shares it. Medical says the study design does not support the claim as stated. Marketing revises the language. Medical flags something new that was introduced in the revision.
Then the GM or business head gives final approval. This approval is typically based on trust in the process that preceded it. The GM trusts that marketing and medical have done their due diligence. The sign off is often a formality.
By this point, days or weeks have passed depending on the cycle meeting timeline. The window to get the collateral printed and dispatched to the field is shrinking. And in that pressure, the basic things get missed. The superscript that should have been added on page four. The footnote that was in the draft but dropped in the design revision. The disclaimer that was compliant in the previous version but was accidentally truncated.
Creator, defender, and quality checker, all in one role
The brand manager knows these gaps exist. But consider the position the brand manager is in. They are the person who created the collateral. They are the person defending the creative choices in front of the GPM. They are the person responding to medical’s flags. And they are the person expected to do a final quality check before submission.
Creator. Defender. Quality checker. All at the same time. For every brand in their portfolio.
This is not a failing of the brand manager. It is a structural issue with how the role is defined across the industry. When one person carries all three responsibilities, the quality checking function is the one that suffers. Because checking your own work requires a cognitive shift that is genuinely difficult. You need to stop seeing what you intended and start seeing what is actually there.
The pattern and the fix
The pattern is remarkably consistent. The errors that delay collaterals are not the ones that require deep medical expertise to catch. They are the ones that require a fresh pair of eyes and 30 minutes of focused attention. A superscript audit. A reference cross check. A compliance checklist walk through. Basic, methodical, and not difficult. But almost impossible for the person who built the collateral to do reliably.
The process is not broken. Most pharma companies produce collaterals that are ultimately accurate and compliant by the time they reach the field. But the path to getting there is longer, more expensive, and more stressful than it needs to be. And the reason is not the complexity of the science or the strictness of the regulations. It is the gap between creation and quality checking.
The companies that have shorter review cycles are rarely the ones with better brand managers or more lenient medical teams. They are the ones that have found a way to separate the quality checking function from the creation function. Whether through a dedicated medical writing team, a pre-submission checklist process, or any mechanism that puts a fresh set of eyes on the collateral before it enters the formal review cycle.
The question worth asking is not what errors your collaterals typically get flagged for. It is whether the person responsible for catching those errors is also the person who created the collateral in the first place.