Strategies for Launching a New Drug

Launching a new drug? Well, the new pharmaceutical commercial model provides some clear challenges and opportunities.

One critical factor for a successful launch will be how well marketers move beyond old approaches that best served the small-molecule commercial model and use non-traditional metrics to guide their strategies. With fewer potential blockbusters, launch strategies will need to become more specific. 

The most common mistake marketers make is relying on traditional Rx-based metrics that lack the multidimensional view needed to present effective information to physicians, payers, and patients.

Defining a Product’s Fit

Understanding where a new product fits into a market and why it is superior to alternatives for certain patients is critical and can’t be done effectively with traditional data alone. Total prescriptions (TRx) and new prescriptions (NRx) information is not enough to create a differential advantage. Here is why. 

TRx and NRx…

• Do not offer insight into a physician’s patient population. These data can’t illustrate breakdowns by age, gender, ethnicity, co-morbidities, and education level.
• Cannot distinguish truly new patients and switches from continuing business.
• Can’t determine shared patients, referrals, or group practice dynamics.
• Do not offer insight about where care is administered. Hospital and facility affiliations are not tracked; significant launches such as IVs and injectables, for which retail prescriptions are not issued, also cannot be tracked.

The best approach for marketers is to create an enhanced patient profile—, which can include such information as diagnosis, prescription history, adherence behavior, and consumer characteristics—to pinpoint candidates who are a good fit for the new therapy. Using this enhanced profile to guide promotion ensures that only patients who are solid candidates for the brand are targeted, which is crucial in this environment of increasingly stringent regulations and tightened spending. 

The market is now much more complex than it has been in the past. Consumers, patients, and caregivers play a significant role in their own healthcare decision-making; physicians, physician assistants, and nurse practitioners can all make prescribing decisions; and payers manage access through disease management guidelines, patient management protocols, and drug formularies.

Pharmaceutical marketers have traditionally only had to worry about effectively communicating to the physician when launching a new product. Now they must address all audiences and understand the market dynamics associated with communicating to those audiences. It is suddenly a lot more complex.

The most common mistake in the context of a launch is over-planning and under-executing. A launch is an incredibly exciting time. Expectations are high, visibility is high, and there is a shared sense of purpose. You seek to do everything right and everything different from what anyone has ever done before. 

The key to success is to identify the three to four factors that will impact success at launch and focus investment on those three to four factors that will realize the greatest return. In this way, resources will be more effectively applied to major drivers of a successful launch.

The circumstances reveal broad complexities for patients, healthcare professionals, and pharmaceutical companies alike. Layered, these issues may make the forecast appear dreary. But whether launching a brand, re-launching a brand, or continuing to market an existing product, there is hope for those who are sensitive to key brand issues and use the shifting terrain as an opportunity to position a brand powerfully and competitively. There are critical factors for a successful launch:

• Partnering with a full-service integrated agency
• Leveraging market research
• Knowing the customer and the competition
• Monitoring positioning and key messages regularly
• Diversifying marketing efforts
• Choosing measurable tactics (think non-traditional)

One of the most important steps is to collaborate closely with a full-service integrated marketing agency that can lend strategic insight to the decision-making process. It may literally pay to talk to marketing companies that offer integrated services. Partners who provide integrated services often represent a benefit to a tightening budget. With little downtime, cross-functional teams can be in the loop and up to speed, ready to execute a new strategic or tactical initiative. This partner becomes the ultimate “brand consultant” in forming strategy, developing breakthrough creative, and expanding media platforms. Additionally, a resource that is often underused is market research.

It can help reveal patient mindsets, unearth hidden issues, and identify subjects respondents are reluctant to address openly. Customer insights gained can produce breakthrough ideas that will be helpful moving forward. Ultimately, a carefully thought-out approach considers the needs of the customer, the actions of the competitors, the special challenges of the pharmaceutical landscape, and the importance of sound tactics that have a clear goal and are measurable.

To be successful today, it is vital to look beyond your desired outcomes and understand the dynamics of the market. It is easy to cite the product study data points, but to build competitive immunity one has to look across the interconnected healthcare decision-making community including patients, providers, payers, regulatory, and others.

A successful launch today is one that sets forth a clear vision and builds upon it in all that follows. As none of us can control the environment, the foundation of your brand has to be solid and built to endure flux.

(Abstract from the source: "Launch Strategies for Blasting Off in 2010"; PM360 - The Essential Resource for Pharma Marketers; Issue: January 2010)