Forensic marketing: how to sharpen pharmaceutical brand strategy

Hello. This is Neal Wolff. Today, we're going to talk about forensic marketing. How to sharpen brand strategy by analyzing recent launches. Forensic marketing is an approach to looking at recent pharmaceutical launches and learning by how they perform.

Forensics is the science of gathering evidence to solve a crime. Now, we're not solving crimes in this analysis, but we're looking at how brands performed and what they got right in terms of understanding a market and what they didn't really get correct so we can avoid pitfalls and allow brands to deliver their performance for physicians and for patients. The things that we want to think about is can we help discover why brands didn't achieve their expectations that were set at the launch. What did companies misunderstand or miscalculate about the marketplace in terms of customers, patients perceptions? What could their launch strategy have been to improve it to accelerate the uptake of a product in the market? How do we apply these learnings? We're not solving a crime but we're applying analysis to help better understand how to continue to add the greatest value for our brands to customers.

It's important to understand that marketing is the science of changing human behavior. We as consumers, doctors as prescribers, patients we all do things a certain way and we're influenced by many factors. If a doctor is prescribing a certain product, why are they prescribing that product? What's the efficacy? What are the side effects? How well do patients comply with the therapy? Affordability. There's a lot of things that go into why we do the things we do. Marketing, let's say we want to introduce a new product into the market. Let's call it product X. If we want the consumer or the customer to prescribe product X, we have to understand why are they doing what they do today and what is necessary. What has to be the value that a brand delivers to that physician and patient in order to prescribe that new product X? The things that go into that is a brand strategy. How are we going to position this drug relative to the existing products in the market? What are the underlying market assumptions? How is the market changing? What is the current landscape? What's the competitive landscape, etc? Then segmenting customers, and we look at customers and we group them by similar behaviors. Those three things are critical drivers to understand how the market is performing today and what might change in the market going forward. To really understand what marketing and pharmaceutical marketing is and marketing in general is, we are all in the value creation business. What do I mean by value? Customers see value in the world of pharmaceuticals as efficacy, how well a product worked, safety, how safe it is, especially relative to other products available and dosing and how frequent a product has to be taken or injected. When we look at value, we have to understand why are they using the product they're using today and how much more value do we have to infuse into the new brands to get them to change their behavior from prescribing what they're doing today to prescribing new products. That really is so important and it's something that we're going to dive into a little bit about and use real world examples to share this. We must understand what value our customers; in this case, we use customers as patients and physicians and payers. Those are the people that are likely going to be interacting with a new product. What's the value that they need and want in order to switch from what they're doing today? The other side and the reason