Countdown to Launch
pharmafile | September 13, 2010 | Feature | Sales and Marketing |Â Â marketing, product launchÂ
When NASA launches a rocket, most of the hard work is already done. The flight itself is relatively short, yet years of preparation have gone into making sure it takes off with the right trajectory and the flight is successful.
A good analogy, then for the launch of a pharmaceutical product. Various research has shown that on average there are just six months post-launch to make a new product successful – and that period is halved for launches in chronic or specialist fields.
The trajectory you establish in those first weeks of your product’s flight will essentially define the long term success of your brand. A sobering thought.
As overall pharmaceutical growth is reducing, there is more pressure on launches in today’s market conditions. There is an increasing concern over risk, with more rigorous studies and more pharmacovigilance required. At the same time, there are more hurdles to reimbursement, with a greater requirement for health outcomes and to demonstrate value.
On top of this, many companies are now investing in growth areas such as biopharmaceuticals, specialist pharmaceuticals and, increasingly, rare diseases and genetic disorders, that often require different approaches to launch.
The challenges and investment involved in bringing a brand to market and the high failure rates in the period of discovery to launch, puts the six month time window for defining your sales trajectory into clear perspective.
There is no ‘off the shelf’ launch template to guarantee your success, but there are some guiding principles for any individual company, brand and market situation. Here are ten simple things that you should consider in the period before launch. Think of them as a countdown to success…
10: Allow enough time
Given these challenges and the very short period to set your sales trajectory – it is vital to allow yourself enough time pre-launch: a full two to three years is desperately needed.
Often when a product is on the market, you don’t have the time to step back and thoroughly assess the market drivers and understand the challenge. Make sure you give yourself appropriate thinking time before launch – this is the opportunity to set the direction of travel.
Getting the best product label requires doing the right clinical trials which meet the unmet needs of all key customers, to developing relationships which will help you prepare the market. You should also be starting lifecycle planning. You need to know where you product is going, and start the relevant trials long before you have launched.
Roche as a company is very good at thinking through and developing a true lifecycle strategy, using multiple trials to investigate how products such as Avastin can be used in many different ways. This has given a second and third bite at that crucial six month trajectory.
9: Build the right team
Itis all about consistency: your goal should be to retain the same people on the brand from pre-launch through to launch, something which is actually quite rare. Pick people who you believe will add value, last the course, and keep them focused and motivated.
Ideally the team should be run by an experienced project manager – or at least a marketer with a particularly strong project management skillset. Leading a successful launch team requires managing a whole host of different processes and cross functional teams – including marketing and market access, manufacturing, supply chain, medical and regulatory.
Obviously the team leader needs to be commercially savvy, but more than that it is about making sure the launch team works well together, are all going in the right direction, that key milestones are hit and that they’re fully engaged in the plan and in the brand.
It is important to share organisational learning, to keep lessons learnt within the corporate memory. Novartis did this well when transferring learning from the successful launch of Glivec to help the success of brands such as Lucentis.
8: Create the right global/local dynamic
As more organisations are being lead through global or European structures, this is a relationship which needs to be established early. Clarity about boundaries, roles and responsibilities, and communication are critical to avoid getting bogged down in internal issues, and to maximise time on customer facing activities. Be proactive and give your input early. Affiliates often sit waiting for a global plan, thus missing an opportunity to engage with and shape the activities of the global team – something the global team actually wants.
You need to look for opportunities to flex. There will be core elements to the global plan, but there will also need to be flexibility, depending on the market requirement.
A well-known example of this is Lipitor. Of course there was consistency and an organisational momentum behind the strong message about lowering cholesterol, but how that was communicated was flexed at a local level; even when a local market required a different brand name or visual to meet local market needs, the overall essence of the Lipitor brand was not lost.
7: Assure reimbursement and access
You can do nothing if you don’t get reimbursed in some way, so this is obviously critical.
You need to think about trial design: are you engaging internally with the right people in R&D and health outcomes? Are you working with countries with similar challenges, learning from each other and avoiding repetition?
What other options are you assessing? How can you leverage value-based pricing? Have you looked at risk-sharing? Have you looked at packaging the product up with other offerings around it?
Reimbursement doesn’t necessarily have to be for a whole population of patients with a particular disease; it could be for a particular segment, based on work you have done around segmentation and positioning where particular patients derive more benefit.
6: Develop deep customer and market insight
You need to know who drives the market, how decisions are made, and exactly what your customers need. Be prepared to take action based on what you hear from customers in research – don’t just ignore it because it doesn’t fit with your product profile.
Get under the skin of the emotional as well as the functional, and that includes your payer or policy maker, whoever they may be. Engage a strong research agency, and ensure you gain genuine insight which allows you do something differently as a result, but also don’t underestimate the power of less formal KOL conversations, clinic visits or ‘chats’ with customers.
Finally, spend time understanding the trends, events, customers and competitors which are moulding and shaping your marketplace and ultimately influencing the success of your brand.
5: Build a robust strategy
This is about converting genuine insight into organisational foresight. Use your deep customer insight, market knowledge and understanding of current trends to develop future scenarios with which you can interact, and from which you can learn; then thoroughly develop your strategy to make sure it is as robust as possible.
This requires an organisation to be prepared to learn, adapt, and come up with strategic options which are hopefully a little more creative. This requires time, but provides you with a plan which can adapt to market or environmental events, rather than a static and reactive plan that has little foresight.
4: Get the positioning right
You need to build a positioning which is credible, adds real value and which ultimately differentiates you, plus is sustainable from day one. It must also have organisational belief.
This is about using your deep insights with creative segmentation – make sure you consider the emotional, functional and price-based benefits to develop real clarity and power around your position. Your positioning should relate to your segmentation and customers’ needs, encompass your brand values, and link into your long term strategy, including market access. This is not just about speaking to patients or physicians – it is speaking consistently to all customers. You might use slightly differently messages and emphasis, but there must be a common position.
Lilly’s Cialis was a good example of the strength of good positioning. Launching into an ED market dominated by Viagra, which was well known and highly successful, Lilly were able to build their positioning around ‘Le Weekend’, giving patients their sex lives back for a period of time, and when they chose.
Although the actual differentiating benefit was relatively small, they owned the emotional space in patients’ and physicians’ minds. It allowed them to challenge for market leadership.
3: Shape the market
Having discussed the shaping of the product and the organisation; we also need to shape the market.
Market shaping is all about paving the way for your brand, driven by the gap between today’s market insights and where the market needs to be for a successful launch.
This requires multiple activities, from KOL advocacy to working with patient organisations, governments, clinical trialists, and so on. Importantly, though, we need to choose the right advocates, and these may not be the most obvious.
Think carefully around your criteria for an advocate. You should research carefully before making that choice, a step many people miss out.
Who really influences? Who do people listen to? Who do they take advice from? Is it different in the online space? Who are the influencers of the future?
It is important to ensure that market shaping is in line with your customer and market mindsets, all too often companies are accused of trying to ‘create’ new medical conditions such as ‘restless legs’ and ‘cardio metabolic syndrome’.
But there are good examples, like the work Pfizer initially did around Viagra which understood that ‘impotence’ restricted potential, was viewed as shameful and was not being actively treated; but that ‘Erectile Dysfunction’ described a medical condition which was not the patient’s fault, and was in line with their market and customer insights.
2: Develop a balanced scorecard and KPIs
To maintain credibility with management, you must be able consistently to show progress towards your goals, and that means having KPIs linked to your strategic drivers and operational plans. This entails agreeing internally what success looks like, which gives you the ability to communicate and show progress, building excitement and momentum, before and during the launch period. At the time of agreeing the KPIs, you need to pressure test them, just as you did your strategy. Don’t simply take the most obvious ones, there is no standard approach to launch success. They will be operationally specific, therapy area specific, product specific. For example, the markers of success for a specialist biotechnology drug and a big primary care blockbuster will actually be very different.
1: Develop internal motivation and excitement
Traditionally excitement around the launch was focused on the sales force, but this is no longer the case: it’s about the whole mix of people. Recruit, train up and invest in the right people, making sure they have the right capabilities. Ask yourself: what do we need to deal with and what do we need to be good at?
Let that define who the right people are to achieve what you are trying to achieve. Particularly key is that anyone who could have contact with customers, even by phone, is completely engaged, trained and supported.
Ensure they understand the strategy and are motivated by the KPIs. Above all, engage people as early as possible in these ten areas, not simply by handing out a ‘launch plan’ at a launch conference weeks before entering the market.
Take off!
Although we have only scratched the surface, these principles are a useful guide to assessing where you need to focus your time, energy and effort.
Having prepared the way, you then need to make sure your messages fit with your strategy and with your positioning; make sure you are targeting the right physicians or the right patients based on your segmentation – make sure you have the right value proposition for your different audiences – make sure that your sales teams have the right training and materials and are motivated – that they understand what it is that you are trying to deliver.
Ensure you have contingencies in place based on alternate futures unfolding, and that you are tracking the different things in the market which challenge your success, ensuring the competition can’t pull apart what you are doing. You have a very amount of time to set the trajectory for your launch.
If you follow these ten steps, you can ensure that at the time of launch, that trajectory is as steep as possible.
Jon Bircher is a head of Bespoke Consulting and Joanna Potts a senior consultant at The MSI Consultancy: www.msi.co.uk. Contact them at jbircher@msi.co.uk and jpotts@msi.co.uk
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