By Dr. Andrée K Bates, December 2011
Most therapeutic markets in the Pharmaceutical Industry are already becoming crowded (and some even saturated), and yet more compounds are entering this space with Phase III trials underway.
Are you in this situation?
You expect your compound will achieve all the end points required, and get regulatory approval to launch into the market. But what will happen then? We are called in to do analytics time after time in the situation where a compound has been launched in a crowded market and failed to take off. These markets have many big brands already, some getting to their loss of exclusivity which means your brand could also likely have generic competitors by the time you launch.
How are you going to ensure that your brand will take hold in this space and provide a value proposition that entices your target audience?
Who is your target audience – is it all the high volume prescribers of your category or is there a niche sub-segment you should target?
There are a lot of things to get right.
One of the first things to get right is ensuring that both the commercial factors that are driving the brand as well as the clinical attributes that drive prescribing are fully understood and utilized. These factors vary across indications, sub-segments of physicians and also different countries. So, do you know whether safety and side effect factors outweigh convenience? In most therapy areas one would expect so but in oncology, given the nature of the condition, efficacy factors such as long-term survival as well as convenience outweigh a poorer side effect profile. Also, sub-populations vary. If one looks at private hospitals versus public we have seen that in one oncology market examined, infused drugs are more of a driver in the private hospital segment and oral therapies in the public hospital segment. Each factor needs to be understood so that not only do you get the key areas to focus on correct, but you also get the right sub-population message focus accurate. By understanding this level of detail you have a stronger understanding of the market and the competitors that will allow you to ensure you are focused on the most profitable messages and segments that your brand can to reap maximum impact at launch. In the 94.8 Analytics portal you can see the specific key drivers in your market, and you can then drill down into sub-segments to view the changes within driver focus for that specific segment for even more advanced power.
Also, what about your competitors? No matter how big a brand is, they usually have some weaknesses that can be utilized by a savvy marketer. Using analytics such as 94.8, you can pull up your competitor profile and see how much financial impact the driver attributes are giving them, and where they have weaknesses you can capitalize on. You can also overlay each driver and its impact for the competitor’s high prescribers versus non-prescribers. You can do the same for your brand in early launch to overlay the competitor’s high prescribers and your non-prescribers to see where they are gaining a perceptual (and, in turn, financial) advantage.
Let’s look at a case study of a drug we did in the US market. They came to us 2 years after launch in a crowded mature market – with generics already on the market – and the product was failing to grow. The analysis was done to reveal 3 major areas of inhibition of growth:
- a wrong message focus
- poor managed care coverage
- a sub-population that had been ignored but would provide strong benefits if targeted
Notwithstanding these, the brand was pretty much doing everything right. Their activity channels and mix were fine; some minor tweaking of allocation was required but without the right message focus, they were all essentially wasting their budget. The messages of their unique differentiator that they were focused on were well received and strong but they were not drivers for this category and, therefore, not impacting prescribing behavior at all. They had done what we have seen many times i.e. focused on the unique differentiator messages without taking care of the basic drivers first. You could think of this in simple terms, like a washing powder advertisement. Think of a washing powder that focuses only on the lovely smell but ignores the core message that it washes clothes clean and whiter than white. They would be strong on that differentiator but wonder why they are not getting the sales they expect despite being very strong on the core message because the core message is not driving sales.
In the case of this brand, the core messages around efficacy - that they had the data to support - were not even touched upon; however, what should have been a secondary message was their core message. So, for the message they focused on, if you overlaid the high prescribers and non-prescribers, both saw them as superior on that message, but it was not driving their prescribing at all. In terms of the managed care coverage, they told us it was around 80%. If that was true then the physicians were not aware of it; however, we suspected it was not true and the physicians knew that.
To test our hypothesis, the company conducted extensive analysis of their coverage and uncovered it was nowhere near as good as they had thought. This needed to be rectified. So they changed their message focus, did some tweaking of their budget allocation and focused heavily on their managed care coverage. When we redid the analysis 6 months later, the brand had more than doubled in market share and the managed care coverage had improved dramatically although there was still work to be done in that area. The overall sales increase in that time, without any increase of sales and marketing budget, was $249 million. Not too shabby!
Conclusions
By ensuring that the marketing is focused on the real drivers (not just what physicians say is driving them but what actually is mathematically proven to be changing their prescribing behavior), and the most profitable segments for your brand (not necessarily the most profitable segments in the category, which may be harder to break into), as well as understanding the competitors’ activity and impact, marketers can create an effective sales and marketing campaign that actually delivers results.
In fact, by using the 94.8 Budget Allocation tool you can even reduce budget and still grow profitably simply by seeing where budget is focused on non-drivers and eliminating that budget. Even more growth would be found by diverting that budget onto the stronger drivers of prescribing. This is only a small subsection of the suite of tools delivered within the 94.8 Portal that provide marketers with a stronger basis for delivering an exceptional positioning strategy based on real drivers and the most profitable market segments. The data, taken together, allows the team the ability to ensure that by tightly targeting their marketing on the core drivers, they can launch a brand in a crowded market and still deliver strong profitable growth – and probably get promoted from it.
In the words of one of our Clients:
‘You made an important contribution to the fact that during the last few years I was able to enjoy very exciting and positive professional development within my company. Maybe this was one of the reasons why I got a new & great promotion. :-).’
For any questions, or if you would like to see a demo of the tools discussed in this article, please contact Dr Andree Bates of Eularis - http://www.eularis.com - or contact your closest Eularis office - http://www.eularis.com/about-us/contact-us - and the message will be passed on to her or a local team member to speak with you.