Mission to maximise

pharmafile | November 2, 2004 | Feature | |   

We all know that 'less is more'. What clearer mission could you have as a marketer – take this product and go forth and maximise its market share. It's almost biblical in its simplicity.

It is a mission that shapes every agency briefing, product tactic and salesforce action plan. Yet in the noisy and cluttered market, that clarity of message is so often lost through over-complicated strategies, fussy detail and boardroom interference. Maximising market share, however, can be achieved in '10 easy steps'.

Imagine your new assignment as a senior product manager is to review and update the marketing plan for brand X  - a reassuring brief from the marketing director to maximise market share (with hints of forward promotion and responsibility coming with success). What could be simpler? In a decade that has seen the blockbuster's slow demise, the focus on maximising effective returns has never been greater.

Pre-marketing phase

In many ways this can be the key to success – refining the efficacy of the product, the breadth of its licensed indications and the dosage spread are all set in stone way before effective launch marketing.

Alternative strategies to 'blockbusterdom' are honed here. What unique niche can be filled? What unmet clinical needs satisfied? Is there a regional benefit to marketing the product? This early-stage commercialisation is vital marketing input into R&D – researching what is needed, not what can be discovered. And if it can be discovered, then what alliances need to be forged. This is as much about search and discovery, as research.

Full product launches are only as effective as their more covert clinical 'cousins', the non-promotional, pre-licence work, which is the second step. The building up of an effective advocate (future user) prescriber is key, and lays the foundations for future KOL work.

The next pre-launch step is obvious: capturing the communications briefing exercises and finalising the sales strategies and tactics that the field force will put into place. With a top-line brief of maximising market share, the agency work can be formalised. Effective briefing is crucial to establish the level of educational need for prescribers or the general public.

Optimising the sales resource is a key focus here – rising salesforce costs require decisions about whether to do it in-house, CSO or via partnering. The mix of these activities will have a significant affect on launch effectiveness, market penetration and sales growth.

Size isn't everything, however, as the optimisation issue needs to answer the question: 'Do we have the correct number of people talking frequently enough to the right customers?' A product launch comes at a time in the product lifecycle  when salesforce effort is maximised. Whether it's your own team or not is secondary to the assessment of numbers from the identification of customers and the effective call strategy.

Effective launch

Traditionally, the approach to ROI questions and others has been to focus on efficiency producing more calls, meetings and associated activities. Increasing things like call volume does not make your salesforce more effective; if your sales team was performing average sales calls on the wrong customers, increasing the numbers only compounds the problem.

As Nev Skelton, group vice president, salesforce effectiveness, IMS Health puts it: "Only by combining the approaches of salesforce efficiency and effectiveness can satisfactory ROI be achieved and top-line growth be maximised."

Skelton adds: "A key measure for the successful investment in a brand, and thus the sales team supporting it, is incremental sales growth. For many companies, it is difficult to tease out the impact of the sales rep from other aspects in the promotional mix; it has, however, become increasingly possible through precision measurement."

Launch support

If we accept that the early months of launch will drive the future of the brand, then early investment is key. For sales reps sitting in waiting rooms, few things give more comfort than seeing the lead spots in the key journals 'shouting' the new brand name and image.

Any 'noise' level investment can be budgeted against clear objectives percentage of noise, ad spot cover and target audience measures. Buying advertising 'shout' volume is no guarantee of success: the media mix, message development and customer perspective all have to be considered. But it is crucial to place the brand message above product features – the brand is more important than the product from day one.

Seeing the right people

Looking at current pharma strategies, it is possible to identify some common threads. They boil down to coverage activities: seeing as many people as possible; and frequency activities repeat calling plans to reinforce product messages. Skelton thinks these strategies are flawed, as they overlook the following key issues:

• Coverage activity does not take into account the spread of prescribing opportunity, which leads to time-wasting.
• Different customer groups or segments, adopt products at different speeds and from different parts of the marketing mix, again leading to time-wasting.
• Differential call frequency may be required by various customer segments.
• Incentivising sales teams based on productivity leads to high frequency calls on 'easy to see' customers, whilst ignoring the potential of less accessible prescribers.

Constant segmentation

One of the challenges is ensuring that the brand remains bigger than the product -the brand will drive the growth whereas the product is just part of it. As the market develops, there is a need to constantly refocus and refine customer segmentation and brand offering.

Customers are individuals and the more this is recognised the closer they can be brought to the brand. Grouping hospitals or PCOs together makes little sense outside of organisational neatness. Looking closely at individual needs will lead to proper segmentation – for example rural, dispensing-led PCOs in Cornwall or Yorkshire will have more in common than geographically close neighbours.

Depth and breadth

Constant strategic focus will move the brand along – a fast schedule, packaging, dosage forms, line extensions and expanding the indications/data sheet to add value and volume. New indications can lead to different brand offerings to increasingly focused customer segments. Packaging and design innovation gives long-term protection from counterfeiters, leading to positive PR.

The supply chain

How does the product reach the pharmacy? The traditional view is the supply chain management of 'main' wholesale and some key account management of the 'Boots-style' operations. The market is more diversified now, with a proliferation of smaller, 'shortline' wholesalers, PIs and the risk of counterfeit supply via the internet and other gaps in the supply chain. Branded products find their way into shortline wholesalers by default rather than by design, trading as devalued currencies, which can be damaging.

Supply chain management is now a far more focused exercise and a tighter grip here, particularly in the more mature product phases can help manage generic competition, compete against PIs and other threats.

Maintaining defence

Every extra month of a stable, mature product sales line, at its maximum market share is worth a lot. Strategies that lengthen the time before generic erosion, and slow down any attrition after patent expiry should be carefully constructed and modelled years before expiry. There comes a time in the life of every product when existing share is maximised, with attention then focusing on longevity. Do these strategies work? A well-planned, interrelated mix of strategies will undoubtedly slow down generic attrition if put in place at the right time.

Explore the molecule- The cynic might observe that product innovation like SR formulations are purely the consequence of the competitive marketplace, that original molecules are launched in the least useful formulation, in order to be improved at the crisis hour! The DH could well ask why all the patient-friendly, value added benefits come at the end of the brand's life; examples would be every SR or XL you've ever known!

Abandon the molecule- A planned and strategic retreat. The new 'host' product needs to be effectively established for two to three years – for example Flixotide to replace Becotide, Nexium to replace Losec.

Hide the molecule in a 'basket' of others- An area of creative potential, where individual products merge into ranges, or can even be combined with service offerings. The term 'managed care' has been hijacked from the US health market and recycled here as packages of products offered to hospitals and even dispensing doctors, often tying in older products with new ones.

Commercial deals are often negotiated on this basis, offering brands at 'generic' prices, initiated by the major retail chains and now offered to pharmacies. Criticism of such dealing is common – the leveraging of unique brands against generic competition is still contrary to the Treaty of Rome, basic EU free trade law, but remains untested legally.

Undoubtedly this will become one of the battlegrounds for brand versus generic in the next 10 years. Creativity has been limited and will be triggered as the competition for a slice of the market for off-patent blockbusters intensifies.

Trade the molecule as a generic- Competing with generic manufacturers seems obvious. A manufacturing track record, global volume costings and no patents to avoid make it look attractive. In reality most pharma companies prefer to 'stick to what they know'. The acquisition of generic houses by brand manufacturers has been a feature of the 1990s, leading many operating subsidiaries to handle the generic side of the business – Bayer's ownership of Schein or Merck acquiring GUK, for example.

POM to P

Selling the molecule OTC is a strategy that only fits consumer-friendly products, but in reality has been the driving force in OTC market growth as companies cash in their brand strength in direct to consumer sales. Ulcer products Tagamet, Zantac and Pepcid compete fiercely in the dyspepsia OTC category, a market previously dominated by older-style antacids. Products like Zovirax create entirely new markets, previously untreated by non-prescription products.

Mission to maximise

In an effort to maximise market share there are three keys to success:

• The forward market view that focuses the original R&D early-stage commercialisation and getting the product right.
• Launch effectiveness and field force optimisation: the market is littered with costly launch failures of effective products.
• The strength of the brand: getting the brand to Coke proportions underpins everything.

Long-term clarity of vision is the key requirement – any lapse will divert effort and focus away from the drive to achieve market share. The industry is improving early stage commercialisation, aware that R&D returns need to speed up radically in order to plug yawning gaps in revenue caused by blockbuster patent expiry.

Optimising sales resources and the 'arms race' of rep numbers are other important factors: in future there will be more refined segmentation and coverage strategies.

Finally, brand development has great scope for improvement, with lessons to be learnt from diverse markets such as retail, finance and FMCG. Only a handful of brands have become household names and that needs to change if sustained market share is to be achieved consistently.