Optimising your brand – one bite at a time
pharmafile | December 15, 2011 | Feature | Business Services, Medical Communications, Sales and Marketing | Alex Blyth, MSI, brand, marketing
Brand managers invest a huge amount of time every year preparing brand plans – but often without really knowing what actually drives the business or what worked last time.
Sometimes this is due to a lack of market insight – but more often the tools needed to understand the strategic implications of the data are not available, or marketers can’t quantify what to do about it.
It is also common for financial targets to be set from on high, and marketers then propose how to spend this budget to reach the goal. The problem is this plan then rarely bears a direct relation to the forecast, and if the target changes, the plan rarely does. Marketers just do their best given what they know, but if they don’t know specifically what drives the business, they can’t have much confidence in their plan when it comes under scrutiny.
Then comes the plan review sessions with senior management. In these sessions senior managers get to throw tough questions at brand managers, who they know have little way of knowing what their plans will actually deliver. How do they know this? Well, they have all been there before themselves!
So history repeats itself with nobody really having the accurate information to forecast the returns of marketing. And of course they don’t want to admit they have no idea – a bit like ‘the emperor has no clothes’ analogy – but rather ‘the plan has no clothes’.
So is this haphazard approach something that marketers simply have to accept, or is there a different approach? Understanding the returns of marketing has long been seen as the elephant in the room – something so huge that most don’t dare to even take it on. But, anyone who knows the adage about ‘how to eat an elephant’, knows that you can make it manageable by breaking it into bite-sized chunks.
So how do we do this? Fortunately, something has changed since your boss’s boss was a marketer – and that is technology. There are now simple online software tools that break this complex and seemingly ‘elephant-sized’ process into bite-sized chunks. The tools available mirror a tried and tested Return on Investment (ROI) process that we have used in the industry for a few years now, but take out the grind of doing it.
But first of all, let’s dispel the myth that you need loads of data to undertake effective resource optimisation. In practice, you probably hold more information in your head about your brands than you give yourself credit for. Working out how to catch a ball doesn’t require calculus, because you can rely on your reflexes. Likewise, putting your money where you’ll get the biggest return doesn’t always require lots of data or the building of a huge mathematical ROI model.
By breaking down the link between what you spend and what you earn into bite-sized chunks, you can make reasonable estimates that give you a good idea of possible resource misallocations in your plan. Later on, your market research manager or an agency can validate this. So having no data to hand is a bad excuse for not checking whether your plan is going to get you where you want to go.
Here are five bite-sized chunks:
Chunk 1: Focus on the REAL opportunity
Here we use the patient flow to identify where there is a need or opportunity for marketing intervention and look at the scope for increasing the volume or value of patients. This gives us an accurate forecast of what share of the market we could expect for our brands, resulting in a much more accurate overview of where the real opportunities exist for growing our business.
Chunk 2: The REAL CSFs
The key to this is to have a view on where revenue is most likely to be generated, and potential barriers to growth to be overcome. What needs to happen to overcome these bottlenecks and drive growth? In reality, they are unlikely to be exactly the same factors as you identified last year. In marketing if it ain’t broke…it soon will be. So keep one step ahead rather than hoping that things will stay the same.
For example, a few years ago Plavix (clopidogrel) had exhausted the percentage of scripts for suitable patients they could win over from just using aspirin for reducing the risk of restenosis in post-stent patients. Looking at patient volume drivers, they appeared to have reached the maximum potential.
However, when we looked at patient value drivers, we found a very different story. Patients were being put on Plavix by the cardiologist and then, once back in the community; GPs gave them the much cheaper aspirin, rather than a repeat prescription!
So even while EU guidelines suggested 10 months on clopidogrel post-stent, the reality in many EU countries was more like 1-2 months. Plavix had a hidden opportunity to increase the segments sales value by at least five times through the CSF of “Getting GPs to comply with EU 10-month duration guidelines”.
To check whether you are concentrating on the right CSFs for your brand you need to build a patient flow model. The patient flow should reflect revenues for today and identify where the opportunities for growth are:
1. Where there are bottlenecks in patients flowing into sales (e.g. only 10% of diagnosed patients getting a Rx), or value per patient e.g. improving compliance)
2. The relative percentage uplift possible in the planning period, e.g. it may not be possible to significantly impact bottlenecks higher up the patient flow, such as percentage of patients consulting a doctor.
Chunk 3: Ensure your tactical objectives are truly SMART
SMART tactical objectives are one of those things we all know about but often don’t actually apply. In the context of planning the acronym should really stand for:
Specific to stakeholder
To check this, put your CSFs in the middle of a blank sheet of paper and mind map who the key stakeholders are that need to be influenced to achieve your CSFs. Now for each stakeholder, map out what needs to be achieved with them, e.g. GPs issuing repeat Plavix prescriptions for 10 months.
Measurable over the year (KPIs)
How will you measure your progress (e.g. percentage GPs reporting to prescribe Plavix for 10 months)? You need to check that your objective can be:
1. Measured at the end of the year
2. Tracked during the year Key Performance Indicator (KPI) to let you know whether you are on track, while you can still do something about it.
Point 2 is normally the more challenging and may require a proxy indicator that tells you in advance if you are on track. For example, it will take 10 months for GPs who have changed their prescribing habits to reach 10 months of compliance, to be able to say they are now prescribing according to EU guidelines.
So how do you know if you are on track in the meantime? You need a KPI. For example: “Percentage of GPs who recognise why Plavix’s benefits over Aspirin make a difference for post-stent patients” would be a first indicator of a change in attitude.
Achievable within the planning period
The time it takes to achieve growth differs according to the type of activity. A rule of thumb is that the higher up the patient flow you go, the longer it takes for the changes to follow through. For example, you can realistically increase GPs repeat scripts within a year if you already have a large GP salesforce and guidelines to work with (e.g. in the case of Plavix).
However, if you identified that only 10% of patients who medically should get a stent (and then Plavix thereafter) are actually getting one, it would take a long time to change this, by establishing partnerships with stent manufacturers, facilitation of guidelines etc. Therefore, to increase the patient pool might take years before you see the fruits of your labour. So be realistic about what is achievable within the planning period you are looking at.
Relevant to the CSF
Remember, all tactical objectives should stem from a Critical Success Factor (CSF). If not then we need to think what is its strategic purpose? Don’t create unnecessary work for yourself but focus on doing a few things and doing them well.
You also need to consider Timings and know if you are on track or not as you go along. Ask yourself, “What will you have achieved by when?” The tactical objective should state the objective within a specific time e.g. a 12-month period. The KPIs that tell you are on track in the interval should also have levels in mind for set review points – these should usually be undertaken quarterly.
Chunk 4: Track KPIs that really matter
We all get very used to tracking the same data month after month, and reassure ourselves it must being doing some good. After all, you show those graphs to everyone, and everyone else shows you theirs, so there must be something in it! If this sounds familiar, then you are probably suffering from a ‘comfort in numbers’ problem. However be warned, this is the same reason that lemmings will all run off a cliff together!
The bad news is that different brands are at different stages in the product lifecycle, and have different CSFs and tactical objectives – therefore they should be tracking completely different things. You may be measuring what feels like everything, but are you doing anything with it?
Or, are you on irrelevant data overload? Are you tracking what really matters for your tactical objectives? If you are unsure about the answer, here is a quick way to check:
Make a list of all your tactical objectives, writing down how you will measure each of them, as well as the KPIs you also need to track during the year. Now ask your market research manager which of these they are tracking for you, and subsequently, what other superfluous data they are also tracking for you. When they tell you they’re only tracking half of what actually matters, ask them to cut out any superfluous data, and spend time measuring things that matter instead.
Suddenly you’ll find yourself looking at a dashboard of data you need, rather than reams of ‘might one day be useful’ data. This will do wonders for your time management, and reduce the number of graphs in your presentations. And even better still, it involves your market research manager in helping to set the KPIs in the first place.
Chunk 5: Spend right on the right initiatives
Our first chunk gave you a view of misalignment and how to improve resource allocation. However, true optimisation requires a more sophisticated approach that’s made much easier if you’ve been measuring what matters.
With the right historical tracking, you can reliably estimate the impact your initiatives are having. By this point you are probably really starting to see that having a tool to do all the calculations for you is very worthwhile for making this process time-efficient, and thus likely to happen in practice.
So, in summary, if we make a concerted effort to break down our ‘elephant’ into bite-sized chunks, we can make the planning process a much more accurate and scientific process, with an infinitely better outcome. This means you can confront an obvious problem or risk no one wants to discuss just because it has always been addressed in that way.
Furthermore, now the ‘joined-up planning’ tools exist to do this for you – what’s stopping you from realising the dream of generations of marketers and actually seeing the returns of your marketing efforts?
Oh, and since you were thinking it – don’t worry they do generally look good in pharma but could always look even better and accelerate growth!
Alex Blyth is head of Marketing Sciences at the MSI Consultancy.
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