Dr. Bates’ Talkback: Marketing tips for crowded pharma markets
Dr. Andree K. Bates suggests strategies to boost growth in crowded markets that may feature generic competition
By on May 3, 2012Most therapeutic markets in the pharmaceutical industry are already crowded (and some are even saturated), and yet more compounds enter these spaces with Phase III trials under way. You expect your compound will achieve all the end points required and get regulatory approval to launch into the market. But what happens then? Markets have many big brands already, some about to lose 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 and provide a value proposition that entices your target audience? Who is your target audience? Is it all high-volume prescribers in your category, or is there a niche sub-segment you should target? There are a lot of things to get right.
Get the message 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 different countries.
Do you know whether safety and side effect factors outweigh convenience? In most therapy areas, one would expect so. But in oncology, 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, infused drugs could be 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 you get the key areas to focus on right and you also get the right sub-population message. By understanding this level of detail, you have a stronger understanding of the market and the competitors. This allows you to ensure you are focused on the most profitable messages and segments.
What about your competitors?
No matter how big a brand is, it usually has some weaknesses that can be utilized by a savvy marketer. Let’s look at a case study of a drug we did in the US market. The firm was two years after launch in a crowded, mature market—with generics already present—and the product was failing to grow. There were three major areas of inhibition of growth: a wrong message focus, poor managed care coverage, and a sub-population that had been ignored but would provide strong benefits if targeted.
Apart from this, 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 essentially wasting their budget. The messages of their unique differentiator were well received and strong, but they were not drivers for this category and therefore not impacting prescribing behavior. They had focused on the unique differentiator messages without taking care of the basic drivers first.
In the case of this brand, the core messages around efficacy—which they had the data to support—were not even touched upon. What should have been a secondary message was their core message.
Managed care coverage was supposed to be around 80%. To test this, the company conducted extensive analysis and uncovered that managed care coverage was nowhere near as good as they had thought. So they changed their message focus and did some tweaking of their budget allocation, focusing heavily on their managed care coverage. Six 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.
By ensuring that marketing is focused on real drivers (not just what physicians say is driving them, but what actually is mathematically proven to be changing their prescribing behavior) and by focusing on the most profitable segments for your brand (not necessarily the most profitable segments in the category, which may be harder to break into), marketers can create an effective sales and marketing campaign that actually delivers results.
Dr. Andree K. Bates, a regular contributor to eyeforpharma, is CEO of Eularis, which applies analytics to determine the sales impact of marketing programs.
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