Case Studies

Background

A pharmaceutical company has nine priority A1 brands in a mix of primary and secondary care, managed until recently by national, regional and global brand managers. Performance of the brands was mixed, and there was no recognition of the company’s bottom line across brands. To understand this using traditional analytics is a difficult feat. The company operates in 107 countries and, taking into account different product/category/country combinations, the quantity of data to collect is significant.

Process

We undertook an intensive four month data collection project, researching the priority markets in terms of volume and/or growth potential. It was imperative to get the full participation of local affiliates, so research was conducted only after identification of local issues with the local marketing teams.

After the research was done, the Eularis process was applied. Firstly, validation within categories to uncover growth drivers, then predictive algorithms for each and then individual brands in each country were analyzed together to uncover where the real growth opportunities were. Out of all the brands and countries analyzed, the ones with the highest growth potential were subjected to even more in-depth analytics right down to the level of messages and tactics with key stakeholders. It was discovered that the company had some serious mismatches between allocation and potential.

Insights

• The client was significantly over-investing in areas with lower growth potential, North America and Japan, which, whilst important markets for the brands, did not justify the percentage of spend they were getting if the company’s bottom line was considered.
• There was under-investment in high growth potential markets such as Asia and Latin America; together receiving only 24% of the global marketing when they should be receiving closer to 34%.
• Three of its brands had the lion’s share of the marketing budget but these were the brands that had already grown and were less likely to grow as much as some of the smaller A1 brands. Imbalances across both the portfolios and regions emerged and if these were addressed, the potential increase in profitable growth could be considerable.

Actions

To address these issues, our client started to reallocate overall budgets across portfolios and countries as recommended by the analytics, as well as across individual sales and marketing activities for each brand in each country for optimal global growth. They freed up some of the investment in the U.S. and put it into where it would provide more return. It was not necessarily an easy process but the Global CFO saw it as a necessary one, given all the issues the industry and the company were facing with investors.

Results

Two years later, results were good. They had continued high growth in priority A1 brands and countries which was higher than their key competitors. Importantly, not only their sales grew but so did the bottom line profit. The investors were also impressed and the share price increased despite a gloomy market. Now the company is displaying the Eularis global results in an Intranet so that individual teams in any country can look at their data and pull out different cuts of data to compare it in different ways.

Background

A large pharma brand was star performer for its company in a high revenue therapy area. However, the brand team noticed that the compliance rates were hovering around 50% and realized that if they could improve this, even slightly, their CMO and CFO would be very happy with the bottom line profit improvements, given the eroding annual growth. To implement this improvement, they created numerous patient compliance programs, including putting significant budget into short message services (SMS) reminder programs to increase adherence. However, these programs were not having the desired impact on compliance and appeared to be wasting the significant resources being put behind them.

Process

The client chose the 94.8 to examine a number of intersecting areas that impact compliance and identified the relative importance of each for this brand:

• Product attributes
• Moderating factors
• Non-intentional non-compliance
• Compliance/Adherence programs
• Emotional factors

This data was then validated and put into predictive analytics.

Insights

• Specific emotional factors were the primary reason patients were non-adherent with this brand rather than non-intentional adherence, for which reminder programs like SMS might have been appropriate.
• Only two of their eight patient compliance interventions were currently impacting adherence.

The brand team refocused on the key messages in the patient adherence programs that addressed the underlying causes, implemented the type of programs that were shown to have an impact on this, reallocated their focus and budget to the areas recommended by the analytics.

Results

The results were impressive. Within 6 months of the analytics recommendations being implemented, compliance rates for their brand had improved significantly, meaning a bottom line increase from improvement in compliance alone of $67 million providing a strong return and a very happy CFO.

Background

This brand was spending significantly on advertising and, having won advertising awards, the brand team wanted to be able to understand why the advertising was not performing and be able to correct the underperformance. They had already commissioned a number of primary market research studies on brand awareness, ad awareness, brand images and attributes, recall of advertising content, brand ranking and preference, advertising vividness measures and more. They also had data on advertising spend and knew they were spending at the same level as key competitors. However, the advertising activity stubbornly remained unsupportive towards the brand's market share despite it being clearly an influencer for the therapy category.

Process

The team decided to use the Eularis Advertising Analytics to find the answers to these issues:

• Message effectiveness, differentiation and frequency across media
• Advertising impact on prescribing behavior and market share
• What to change do better?
• Advertising agency results

The resulting picture of this brand’s advertising was broken down into content/themes, execution, frequency, individual campaigns and sentiment. The analytics provided answers to all the questions raised questions and showed the key topics/themes that the advertising needed to be built around and highlighted some of the problems found in execution, suggesting what needed to be done to improve results in advertising effectiveness and bottom line results, and how to alter the messaging and execution.

Results

Six months later, follow up studies showed an improvement in content impact and the execution had increased effectiveness resulting in improvements of 3.5% market share directly attributable to the advertising.

Background

This brand had been launched for 2 years and not shown impressive growth, whilst its key competitor was sitting on a huge market share and continuing to perform well. A plethora of analyses had been conducted but the brand continued to struggle.

Process

Eularis’ Analytics were employed. Key barriers to uptake of the brand were uncovered that had been previously dismissed in other analyses. The results of the analytics were then utilized to make recommendations and an action plan for the brand.

Insights

The team had decided not to focus on efficacy as they had decided it was ‘entrance to the ballpark and not a key issue to focus on as all of the brands in this space were highly effective’. Their key competitor had efficacy as a core focus and was reaping the benefits our client was missing by ignoring this critical area. In addition, a tricky but significant issue was also uncovered for this diabetic brand around managed care. They had believed they had around 80% coverage when the analytics showed that did not appear to be the case. We recommended further investigation so the team conducted an internal audit and discovered that the 94.8 Analytics was indeed correct and they did not have the coverage they had thought.

Results

The brand doubled in market share within 2 months of implementation of the recommendations around changed message focus and getting more managed care coverage and after 6 months had increased by almost 50% market share which had translated into $249 milllion in revenue.

Background

A primary care brand was in a crowded marketplace but with a good market share and had been growing well until the last two years. The brand team regularly commissioned a number of primary market research studies including Detail Follow-ups (DFUs) but the market share results remained the same.

The team commissioned Intent to Prescribe research with the outcome that physicians said they intended to prescribe more of this brand but sales continued to stay static. Undeterred, the team searched for other methods to measure performance and uncover real influencers that would have more actionable recommendations.

Process

The Eularis Analytics System was implemented to uncover that the field force activity was just supporting the current market share but would not be effective in growing the market share if it continued as it was, despite the results of the intent to prescribe research. When looking at the overall analytics for the brand it was seen that, although the product messages were reasonably well entrenched from all the previous good work, the promotional effort was now lagging behind key product messages it had previously established. This meant that the brand could defend its current market share but not necessarily get more market share from the allocated budget.

The Eularis team concentrated on the following areas:

• Effectiveness of reps in delivering key messages?
• Are key message differentiated enough against competitors, effective and should they be changed?
• Which messages provide the most influence on changing actual prescribing behavior?
• Are sales materials providing the appropriate messages?
• Is call frequency and focus appropriate?
• Detailing v promotional activities to gain market share?
• What are competitors’ sales forces doing differently?

Insights

Recommendations around the focus of the message, rep activity, detail aids and how the detail call should be broken down were made. Specifically it was found that the reps were giving the messages but not effectively making comparisons with some of the key competitors. It was also found they were not showing the physicians the target profile of the patient that their drug would be best for so that the target patient was firmly implanted in the doctor’s mind.

Results

The market share increased three market share points and importantly now the field force could clearly be seen to be having a real impact on market share results through the changes made in their activities.

Background

A successful brand had been in decline for several years. To slow the decline, the company increased activity spend dramatically to almost double its competitors and yet the brand continued to decline, with no market share impact from increased spend and activities. The company was confused as they were using extensive ROI analyses and allocating accordingly. In fact, the therapeutic category, and the industry in general, were undergoing significant changes which meant that utilizing traditional ROI analyses to determine how to allocate budget moving forward was a fundamentally flawed exercise.

Process

The Eularis System analyzed the brand and its competitors and determined how focus and budget should be directed in various areas. For example, it showed which key messages would have maximum impact on the brand performance and how the reps should be focusing their time during a detail call. It also how budget could be diverted from communication activities which were not having any impact at all on prescribing to the high performing ones.

Insights

The recommendations refocused on messages with potential to give the most marked increase in market share by:

• Reallocated marketing effort to areas analytics recommended
• Trained rep to do detail differently with different emphasis
• Reallocated current budget to budget mix recommended by system

Results

The brand market share went up by 0.8% in the six month period after the first analytics were carried out, despite almost three years of straight decline previously. On top of that, the brand was now performing at a much higher level market share, and in the following six months brand market share increased by 2.2% market share, with continued growth subsequently.

Background

A core brand was launched in the '90s and was a star performer for its company in a high revenue therapy area and continued to be well-respected in the market. However, over the last few years, performance had declined. Market share fell month after month, with no obvious reason. The product was good, run by a strong team with a good plan and focused on accountability and performance. The business unit submitted detailed financials with key performance indicators and updated forecasts. The team tried increasing spend but the brand consistently dropped in market share, despite spending close to double any of the competitors.

Process

The Eularis Analytics Approach was employed to uncover the problem: that despite a strongly supported and well-liked brand, smaller competitors were stealing market share bit by bit. The analytics uncovered three interesting areas that could be improved.

Insights

The first area needing focus was messaging. The team had too many core messages and these needed to be tightened to the core driver messages to make the message hit home in all mediums – rep and communication channels. In addition, a large amount of money was being spent in some communication channels that were simply not drivers for the segment they were focused on and budget was reallocated away from the remote marketing activities into the driver activities such as meetings programs and some money was actually saved.

Results

Six months later, the analytics were re-employed. The recommendations had been followed and the brand had gained 1.7% market share and this was the first market share increase in several years with a reduction on overall budget.