Case Study

AstraZeneca

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HealthcareStrategy

AstraZeneca Healthy Hearts Africa: pan-African cardiovascular health awareness across nine markets

Newmark led the pan-African cardiovascular health awareness and stakeholder management programme for AstraZeneca's Healthy Hearts Africa initiative across nine African markets simultaneously.

African markets managed simultaneously

Insight

Managing a single coherent brand strategy across nine African markets simultaneously — each with different media landscapes, regulatory environments, and informal health communication networks — required a level of field intelligence that no standard market research methodology could provide.

The Challenge

AstraZeneca's Healthy Hearts Africa programme needed to operate across nine African markets simultaneously while maintaining a coherent brand and stakeholder narrative. Each market — Kenya, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Ghana, Uganda, Côte d'Ivoire, Senegal, Rwanda, and Nigeria — presented a different media landscape, regulatory environment, healthcare professional network, and patient communication culture.

The challenge was not simply to translate a single campaign into multiple markets. It was to build a programme that was genuinely effective in each market while maintaining the strategic coherence of a pan-African initiative.

Our Approach

Newmark applied the Field Intelligence System (FIS™) to map each market's formal and informal health communication landscape before a single piece of content was produced. Healthcare professional networks, patient advocacy groups, regulatory pathways, and media relationships were mapped in each country.

This intelligence governed the programme design — ensuring that each market's activity was calibrated for its specific environment, while strategic oversight ensured consistent brand and narrative across all nine.

Execution

The programme ran concurrently across all nine markets, with in-country coordination supported by Newmark's regional network. Stakeholder mapping identified the key healthcare professional influencers, patient community leaders, and media relationships in each market.

Media strategy was differentiated by market — what worked in Nairobi required a different approach in Dakar or Addis Ababa. Stakeholder communications were timed and sequenced to build momentum across the pan-African programme rather than creating isolated, unconnected market activities.

Results

The Healthy Hearts Africa programme achieved sustained awareness across all nine markets, with measurable shifts in healthcare professional engagement in each country.

The programme demonstrated that a coherent pan-African health strategy is achievable without flattening the genuine differences between African markets — and that the intelligence required to navigate those differences is only available through ground-truth field research.