Something’s off in the world of your brand. Perhaps sales are down, and physicians are turning to other brands or generics to meet their needs. Or maybe the competition has turned up the heat with new clinical trial data, or some extra benefit has been uncovered. For a host of reasons, your brand could be underperforming. It’s time to enhance your brand for a better tomorrow.
But the process of recalibrating a brand can seem daunting and dreadfully overwhelming. How do you even begin?
In this article, we detail a winning process for turning around an underperforming brand and highlight how it was used in a real brand case study. By understanding brand positioning, comprehensively researching the causes of current brand problems, and using a three-step approach to reposition your brand, you can fend off stagnation and decline and boost your brand (and your career).
Brand Life and Positioning
Brands have a simple lifecycle, one shared across the board, and one that can be beset in any stage by problems. Through the initial uptake, growth, maturity and decline stages, brand teams are doing their best to maximize the brand’s commercial value. To do it effectively, brand planners and team members use a deep understanding of the brand’s potential for market performance and revenue, and a skilled management strategy.
Much of brand performance is based on positioning, creating a specific place in the market for the brand and delivering benefits to a select group of users. A brand’s position is often in comparison to major competitors, and can include several key advantages, including price, quality, product attributes, distribution and usage.
Problems happen over a brand’s life cycle. A brand can fail to meet expectations, and this can have severe implications for the company’s market and shareholder value. The brand can post declining sales, loss of consumers, or lack of relevant product benefits. In short, the brand’s positioning is failing.
Why do these problems occur? A wide variety of reasons – so many reasons, in fact, that it’s often a challenge to identify the relevant cause of trouble for your brand. Let’s look at some other areas in which possible problems can occur.
Roots of the Problem
What is causing your brand to stagnate or decline? Brand performance problems can occur in four major areas.
Market Knowledge
A brand may fail to meet company expectations if these expectations are unrealistic. Additionally, brands operating without a clear, extensive knowledge of the market could be doomed to failure. Naeymi-Rad suggests asking a key set of questions to pinpoint problems with market knowledge:
- Market
o Did we size the market properly?
o What were our target market segments and did we prioritize them correctly?
o Did we understand the drivers and barriers to penetrating each segment?
o Are our assumptions around market growth accurate?
- Competition
o How does our product profile compare with those of competing products?
o Based on that profile, what market share can it reasonably be expected to capture?
o Is current performance commensurate with those expectations?
- Forecast Methodology
o Is our methodology sound?
o Are our data sources credible?
o Do we have data gaps and, if so, how do we fill them?
o If our forecast is not valid, then what level of performance is feasible?
Marketing and Promotion Knowledge
A brand may stumble for other reasons. Marketers must intimately understand their product’s profile, particularly in terms of advantages and drawbacks compared to competitors. Marketing messages may not be appropriate without a deep knowledge of how the brand relates to other brands in safety, efficacy, convenience and other areas.
In addition, marketers and brand organizers must know and use the company’s greater strategies and business objectives. Marketing messages about the brand can be misaligned to these overarching needs and goals, and result in messages that miss out. Finally, brand planners must know the best segmentation and targeting methods to get appropriate messages out to consumers. Using the wrong promotional mix can cost in terms of brand image and brand sales.
Managed Markets
Do you have sufficient market access through managed care organizations and Medicare? Brands without preferred status in formularies could be locked out and away from end-users. Additionally, if access is good, but sales are still slow, perhaps company departments are not coordinating effectively to drive sales. Marketing, Managed Markets and Field Sales must work together to leverage good market access.
Sales Tactics
Brands can also under perform if a sales force is not operating at maximum efficiency. Improperly sized sales forces, or sales forces without sufficient training and skill, can hurt a brand. Similarly, poorly constructed compensation schemes can slow brand performance by de-motivating sales representatives.
Repositioning to Enhance Brand Performance
Whether it relates to market knowledge, marketing and promotion, managed markets, or sales strategy, a problem exists - one that’s causing painful repercussions for the company and for you. How can you go about repositioning the brand, turning it around for optimal performance?
With this three-step approach, you can improve an underpeforming brand.
Information Gathering
No matter whether a lack of information or knowledge is the root cause of your brand’s trouble, solving it means studying up. Your goal is to collect information on the brand, its complete history and its status in the here and now. How was the brand differentiated from the rest of the pack in the past? What about now?
Information gathering doesn’t stop there. Along with the brand, you must become well versed on current customers. Who buys your brand today? How and why do they buy the product? What’s special about your customers? In addition to background knowledge and statistics, you also want to gain understanding of customers by interacting with them.
Through the use of focused groups in a few key markets, you can quiz your customers on key issues, including:
• Why select our brand?
• What goes into your decision-making process?
• What are you looking for from this product?
• How do you use the product?
By doing this, you understand the brand as it stands today. You’re also identifying opportunities and customer needs that will be instrumental in further steps.
During this phase you also are gathering key information about current marketing efforts. How does this brand fit in to the overall company product offerings? What promotional strategies and mixes are being used? What materials are used to communicate messages about your brand?
Finally, you must gather complete information on the competition. Review and understand the number and names of major competitors, as well as how they’re performing: check out market share, customer profiles, patterns and more. Learn what they’re doing right and what they’re doing wrong.
Integrate and Create
With this comprehensive information gathering process complete, you have a good understanding of where the brand has been, and where it is today. The next step is determining where it should go in the future.
This stage of brand repositioning involves brainstorming with your team on where you want the brand to be, what benefits it will deliver and how to promote the brand. The vision for your brand should be unique, relevant, sustainable and extendable. It should honor the core values and essence of your brand, as well as those of the company. And most important, it should be built on the extensive research and information you gleaned in the previous stage. Through the use of company workshops or other focused groups, and with these considerations in mind, you should develop several potential brand platforms.
With multiple possible platforms, the next step is narrowing these down to the best brand repositioning. Involve your customers again in group sessions, and test how these platforms match with their needs, desires and buying patterns. From this process, a natural victor will emerge.
Execute
With this new direction for your brand, it’s time to spread the word.
Before utilizing the new brand positioning in the “real world,” make sure everyone is on board. The brand team and all cooperating divisions must understand and support the new brand positioning. They must feel a part of the process by providing feedback, and having their thoughts truly considered. And they must be prepared for the future with supporting materials explaining the brand positioning, the reasons behind it, the research supporting it and how it will deliver value and growth for the company.
Once the brand team is part of the action, and the brand positioning is presented to senior management, the work of getting the message to consumers begins. It’s time to consider image specifics, advertising methods and promotional vehicles. In addition, to provide valuable insight on customers on an ongoing basis, your brand plan should include continual information gathering and analysis through predictive analytics. With an analytical structure in place, you can effectively analyze customer information coming in, and provide a clear picture of what is going to happen. Predictive analytics also help hone campaigns in real time, develop targeted offers, fine-tune specific messages to specific customers and monitor campaign results. This can help optimize all the repositioning work you’ve done, guiding brand actions through initial rollout and long into the brand lifecycle.
Case Study
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’, but still the brand continued to decline, with no market share impact from increased spend and activities. The brand had been at 17.8% market share in June the previous year and, despite high levels of communications activities, the product was declining in market share. Also, a lot of money was being spent on strategies that were either badly planned in terms of messages or executed poorly.
By January, the brand had moved further down so that instead of a 17.8% market share, it was at 17.5% market share. The client had negative ROI and was unsure of how to allocate spend across the mix to slow decline. The brand was spending significantly on sales force and communications activities, but not having sufficient impact on the brand to stop the decline in market share. The brand was performing at a 17.2% market share (but had not yet reached this low) and was predicted to decline to that market share in the following six month period if nothing changed.
New Approach: Information Gathering
The new system they turned to (Eularis 94.8 Analytics) analysed how focus should be directed in various areas using the analysis of validated current market data. The first step was gathering current market data and then validating this data. The data collected included data around messages, rep activity, promotional activity, managed care and formularies and competitors, as well as financial metrics.
New Approach: Integrate and Create
This data (post validation) was integrated into analytics with the financial metrics to uncover some interesting insights. For example, it showed which of the key messages would have maximum impact on the brand performance and how the reps should be focusing their time within a detail call. It also showed which communication activities were not having any impact at all on prescribing and could be dropped, which should be increased, and how much budget should be diverted from the poor performing activities to the higher performing ones. The analytics gave an indication of how to allocate the rep and communications budgets for optimal market share gain. Current target market data was utilised with overall promotional budgets provided to predict a market share response to a given marketing budget allocation.
New Approach: Execute
The brand team took all recommendations on board and refocused on messages proven from the analytics to have the most potential and carried out the recommendations to increase in market share by doing the following:
Reallocating marketing efforts to areas analytics recommended
Training reps to do detail differently with different emphasis
Reallocating current budget to budget mix recommended by the system
Action and Results
The brand’s market share went up from 17.5% to 18.3% in the six month period after the first analytics were carried out, despite almost three years of straight decline previously. In addition to that increase in market share, the brand is now performing at a much higher level of 19.7%!
This means that the good work done in the preceding seven months not only moved the brand up to 18.3%, but actually boosted results enough to support a 19.7% market share. Currently, the team reuses the system every six months to ensure new market environment and other factors are accounted for unceasingly for continuous refinement and growth in market share. In January 2008, the brand was at 19.8% market share (0.1% market share point above our prediction of 19.7%).
Conclusion
Tackling brand positioning problems can seem impossible. However, with deliberate research, good analytics and careful planning, it can be done. You can boost an under-performing brand, meeting key company goals, creating revenues and profits and providing yet another win for your career.
For more information on this topic, please contact the author, Dr. Andrée K Bates at:
Eularis
Tel: +44 (0)20 7403 5378
Fax: +44 (0)20 7900 2086
http://www.eularis.com
E-mail: abates@eularis.com
