Future Unfolded: Redefining Healthcare and Pharma Strategies

What You Will Learn

The world doesn’t change all at once—it evolves—often in subtle ways that build momentum over time. For pharma marketers, understanding these shifts is essential. Cultural forces shape how patients think about their health, how providers approach care, and how systems adapt to meet new challenges. Ignoring these forces means falling behind, but embracing them unlocks new opportunities to lead.

At Klick, we call this philosophy FuturePathing—the practice of building optionality for the future. It’s not about predicting a single outcome with certainty but preparing for a range of possible futures. By tracking the adjacent possible—the space where today’s trends, innovations, and behaviors signal what’s next—we can help brands build the flexibility and foresight they need to navigate change seamlessly. 

Why Culture Is Key

Every decision your brand makes today is part of a larger cultural context. Trends in behavior, technology, and values don’t exist in isolation—they ripple across industries and impact how people make decisions. For pharma marketers, these cultural forces shape how patients, providers, and systems interact with your brand.

Take, for example, the growing expectation for personalized, on-demand experiences. No longer just a tech trend, these expectations represent a cultural shift that changes how patients engage with healthcare. Whether it’s digital tools for managing chronic conditions or the increasing demand for transparency, cultural forces drive behaviors that define the health ecosystem.

Sensitizing ourselves to these signals gives us more than just insight—it gives us options. With the right awareness, we can identify today’s decisions that will prepare brands for tomorrow’s opportunities. The goal is simple: to position your brand to thrive across a range of future scenarios, no matter how the specifics evolve.

What This Series Will Deliver

Each year, Klick identifies the cultural forces we believe will shape the next 12 months and beyond. These forces are actionable frameworks for navigating complexity and staying ahead.

This year’s series is grounded in FuturePathing. We’ll explore the adjacencies that emerge from today’s trends and innovations and show how pharma brands can leverage these insights to prepare for the future while shaping it. Identifying the foundational capabilities your brand needs helps it adapt and pivot effectively, no matter how the landscape evolves.

Your Future Starts Now

The future doesn’t arrive in a single moment—it’s always revealing itself in the present. You can stay ahead of the curve by tuning into cultural forces and recognizing emerging adjacencies.

Are you ready to see what’s next?

Over the next few weeks, we will explore five key cultural forces shaping our world and the health and pharma industry in 2025. Each force will include our analysis and examples of the force coming to life, plus predictions for 2025 and the impact on patients, HCPs, and other stakeholders.

Cultural Force 1: Mediated Existence. We no longer engage with the world without a digital information lens to augment and inform our experience.

Cultural Force 2: Fractured Futures. The gender gap is widening and will become a rift, impacting areas like healthcare access, economic opportunities, and technology.

Cultural Force 3: Generation Algorithm. Algorithms are reshaping how we interact with the world on every level. It will be crucial to remain aware of these influences and seek to balance the efficiency of algorithms with the richness of human experience.

Cultural Force 4: Context Is Everything. As people navigate an increasingly complex world, the ability to contextualize information and experiences becomes not just a tool for efficiency but a necessity for meaningful interaction and decision-making.

Cultural Force 5: Emotions Running High. As people celebrate wins in one breath and confront frustrations in the next, these heightened feelings drive cultural shifts, sparking resilience and resistance.

How We Do It

We approach predictions of cultural forces in two different ways:

Klick Health’s cultural forces and predictions are developed based on this research. Unlike other trend reports, we always bring a health and pharma lens to our work, ensuring that the identified cultural forces are relevant to our industry (although not exclusively about our industry). We develop implications and thought-starters for our specific audiences.

The Model

We use the following model to help us make sense of the chaotic set of trends that make up culture. 

Roots

All cultural forces are rooted in larger human needs and global events.

Key examples of Roots include the following:

Urbanization The world is becoming increasingly urbanized as people leave rural areas to find employment and community. 

Demographic Shifts Many countries are experiencing shifts, including Japan’s aging population and the youth movement in the Global South. 

Climate Change The realities and fears around global climate change are impacting day-to-day life in countless ways.

Global events, which are changing culture and slower-moving, are monitored by organizations like the UN and various US government agencies. These agencies produce annual reports detailing the most recent implications and making predictions about what’s to come. 

Branches

At Klick, we define cultural forces as the patterns moving in culture, identified by the accumulation of trends and rooted in larger global changes. Most often, these forces have been building and shifting for years before we name them; they take on different faces and impact our lives differently. In our model, these are the Branches. They don’t disappear as quickly as the Leaves. The Branches are our focus when it comes to identifying cultural forces.

Leaves

In our model, the signals that are easiest to see are the Leaves. These signals and fads represent a moment in time. They may disappear quickly, but they tell us something important about what’s happening in culture. Trend-hunting organizations often report on these signals, and sometimes, a fad rises to mass-media attention—a TikTok format like “brat Summer” or a trend connected to a big event like the movie Wicked. Our team observes, tracks, and catalogs these trends and fads throughout the year to help us see the emerging patterns.

We are excited to share Klick Health’s cultural forces over the coming weeks. These reports culminate a year of observation, research, analysis, and discussion from strategists steeped in pharma and health. Understanding how culture shifts and changes is critical to predicting what comes next for us and our industry.  Happy 2025!