Ten years ago, on the 18th April 2013, our CEO, Kay Wesley, set up Kanga in her spare room. Since then, we have partnered with 38 pharmaceutical and healthcare companies to embed digital across brands and markets and make a real impact on the industry. We’ve even won four industry and business awards, and been nominated for 11, along the way!
After two years of working from Kay’s spare room, where she recruited Kanga’s first two members of the team, the company moved into our home at Meadowside in Congleton’s town centre.
In the years following the office opening, Kay built a 50+ strong team of digital experts, many of whom have worked at a senior level within top 10 pharmaceutical companies (and other industries too, such as software development, recruitment, banking, FMCG, media, travel, automotive, not-for-profit, and entertainment). With such a diverse team came an impressive portfolio of experience, which Kanga uses to provide the best digital strategies and solutions to pharma.
We are incredibly proud to have stuck to our Congleton roots. Where many other agencies move to a large city office after a period of growth, Kanga remained located where Kanga was born and where we are surrounded by healthcare giants in our peripheral, such as AstraZeneca’s Macclesfield global manufacturing site, Alderley Park (a leader in the field of life sciences) and the new Christie’s Cancer Centre in Macclesfield.
To commemorate our 10th anniversary, we caught up with Kay to discuss Kanga’s 10 years and how the company has evolved since its inception…
It’s been a decade since the inception of Kanga! What made you start the company in the first place?
“I started Kanga to create a service that I didn’t have myself back when I was Global Head of Digital in a top 10 pharmaceutical company.
“I found that in that role, I was conducting an orchestra of lots of different agencies… I had a creative agency, I had a tech agency, I had a strategy partner, and many other companies that I had to work with too. The service I so desperately needed was a one-stop shop for all things digital and omnichannel.
“Back then, I found that medical agencies were not really experts in digital, and digital agencies were not experts in medical, so I wanted to create something that really bridged the divide and create a company of digital medical experts who could cover all bases and be a one-stop shop for clients.”
What challenges did you come up against in the early days of Kanga?
“In the early days, a lot of Kanga’s competitors were the big five marketing agencies, and they had large budgets and expansive experience. They also had global coverage and were competing in many different areas.
“I set up Kanga as a global organisation from the start, and instantly we were competing with advertising agencies such as McCann, and consultancies such as McKinsey. Therefore, we had to punch above our weight from the outset by bringing in some extremely experienced employees and thought leaders in the pharma industry.
“We had to compete for employees and create an amazing culture that attracted top talent. I had worked in other, bigger agencies and didn’t always get on with the culture, so I knew I needed to create a workplace whereby people wanted to work and stay with Kanga for a long time. I wanted (and still want!) our people to enjoy what they do at work… they are at work for a huge amount of their day after all!
“Fast-forward 10 years and we have some amazing, admirable, and industry-excellent people working at Kanga, some of whom have been with us right from the start, along with our super-fresh talent too. I have the skill of employing people who are better than me at doing things, and so Kanga started off with a very good team, many of whom are still working with us today!
“Of course, when you’re a start-up you also need to make sure that you’re looking after the cash flow and the compliance measures. From the experience I had already, I knew what was required logistically to set up Kanga.”
What has been your proudest moment since you started Kanga?
“I have a couple of stand-out proud moments, one of which happened just last month when we won the Employer of the Year award!
“My number one goal for Kanga – underpinning all our business goals – is to create a workplace of happy people who love what they do, and this award confirms that we have achieved this. We won the award for the way we treat our people and for our commitment to providing an inclusive culture across our business, locally, nationally, and internationally. The cherry on the cake is that we won the award just before our big tenth anniversary – what a fantastic end to Kanga’s first decade!
“Going down the list of business goals, we have ‘making a real impact on patient outcomes and healthcare’. We also have ‘addressing the climate emergency’. Of course, we have other business objectives and obviously we have financial goals and KPIs, but our experience is that if we hit our happiness, patient and planet goals, financial success follows.”
You said that one of Kanga’s main goals is to make a real impact on healthcare. Do you feel like you have achieved this?
“Yes. I firmly believe that we’ve made a real impact on healthcare, because of the team we have, of course, but for several other reasons too…
“First of all, we’ve got quite a few people (like myself) who have had careers outside of the pharma industry. We have used this experience to test the accepted norms of the industry and keep a fresh perspective that really challenges our clients’ ingrained way of working. We don’t accept the phrase ‘that will never work here’.
“When I first joined the digital department of a big pharma company many years ago, I was consistently told ‘that will never work here’ when I suggested new things. In 2023, just about all my suggestions that were rebuffed by my then-seniors are now working very well, thank you very much.
“Furthermore, we put the patient and the healthcare professional right at the centre of everything we do. How do we do this? We always try and co-create with the customer, and we don’t let accepted processes get in the way of good practice. We often end up reinventing clients’ ways of working and holding their hands as they do things differently for the first time.
“We’ve won and been nominated for awards for having an impact on patient outcomes, which I am very proud of and is a demonstrable way of showing that we have indeed made a meaningful impact. We’re very good at measuring the impact we have – getting the KPIs right is a big passion of ours.
“I’m confident that we will continue to have an impact on healthcare over the next 10 years and beyond.”
What’s Kanga’s greatest strength?
“I think Kanga’s greatest strength – and it sounds trite, but it really is true – is our people, who we lovingly refer to as our ‘Kangaroos’ (or ‘Roos’ more colloquially!).
We’ve got a fantastic, loyal team who are supportive of each other and of the business. The team is dedicated to delivering the best work possible for our clients.
“Our team contains more thought leaders than any other digital health agency in the sector by far. Many agencies have one or two thought leaders, we have maybe 20 or more, all of whom are incredibly experienced and have been doing this, like myself, for a long time. I believe it is so important to have that level of experience within a business. Our experts stay with Kanga, quite simply, because they like working here.
“We look after our people very well and we are a very family-friendly employer because our people work entirely flexibly, which allows the team to fit their lives around their work. Our people are our greatest asset, and certainly, the asset we spend the most time looking after and developing.
“I’d like to say thank you to all of them for the great work they do.”
How has the pharmaceutical and healthcare industry changed in the last 10 years, and what predictions do you have for the next decade of pharma?
“The industry has changed a lot in the last 10 years!
“So, when we started Kanga, digital was seen as something new and innovative, and clients would come to us saying, ‘What is a digital strategy?’ and ‘We need to get started on this digital project’.
“In the early days, we also found we had to persuade some people, especially leaders, to re-engage with doing things in an omnichannel or digital way after being burned by digital projects that had previously gone wrong. In the noughties, some pharma marketers put up ‘brochureware’ promotional websites, didn’t optimise or promote them, and of course they didn’t work, leading to cynicism amongst some leaders.
“Nowadays, all big pharma, many mid-sized companies, and medical device organisations have digital transformation on their agenda, and everybody (who hasn’t already) now wants to get started on it. The industry can see that it’s important and that there’s a new business model which will save a lot of money and be a lot more effective… who wouldn’t want that?
“However, there’s still a lot of work to do and I’m not sure that pharma is doing digital and omnichannel well yet. At the very least, pharma has moved on and understands that digital is extremely important.
“Naturally, middle managers from 10 years ago are now in senior positions within pharma companies and are driving digital from the top, which is very refreshing.”
What’s next for Kanga?
“Kanga has had a very successful first 10 years, and we’re very much looking forward to the next 10! We have seen our work having a real impact on our clients, patients, and HCPs, which is fantastic!
“We have got a wonderful management team driving work for some fantastic clients whom we really enjoy working with across the world. We have clients in Europe, the US, and Asia Pacific, and we are continuing to support them in both digital projects and digital and omnichannel transformation.
“We’re seeing our work becoming more and more strategic. We are increasingly partnering with our clients to create a whole new ecosystem and omnichannel way of working, right from mindset, skills, and training, to developing and delivering digital assets in multiple countries.
“Kanga is also doing more global-to-local projects, which is our forte, and we are very well placed to continue that kind of work. Global-to-local is the kind of work that our team gets excited about because the impact on patients and healthcare can be seen worldwide.
“Thank you to all our loyal clients and partners for sticking with us thus far, and here’s to the next 10 years of Kanga.”
