Strategic planning: don’t just do it, use it

pharmafile | October 28, 2013 | Feature | Manufacturing and Production, Medical Communications, Research and Development, Sales and Marketing |  MSI, craig, strategic planning 

Every year, thousands of pharma employees spend endless hours in meetings discussing, building and presenting brand plans. Countless teams develop rationale for spending millions on projects and activities to drive the success of their brand(s).

The problem is, most brand plans in pharma tend to be generic – or to be more accurate, inefficient. The reason for this is that we have forgotten the art of using, rather than simply ‘doing’, planning.

To consider why, I’d like to go back to 2 August 216 BC and Hannibal’s defeat of the Romans at Cannae. After marching through Spain, France and famously crossing the Alps with his elephants, Hannibal’s army of 50,000 Carthaginians defeated an 85,000 strong army of Rome’s finest.

By enticing the Romans to attack the centre of the Carthaginian line, Hannibal drew the strongest Roman fighters forward, leaving weaker forces exposed on the flanks and rear. His cavalry and heavy infantry then encircled the Romans.

Not only were the surrounded Romans defending on four sides, but in an increasingly confined space their soldiers didn’t have enough room to fight, removing any advantage of superior numbers. The victory was unprecedented and has been referenced for over 2,000 years to help define strategy.

For the purposes of this article, I’d like to use the following definition from ‘Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters’ by Richard Rumelt: “A good strategy works by harnessing power and applying it where it will have the greatest effect.”

So, back to pharma: if the above quote defines good strategy, then a good strategic brand plan in pharma must be a ‘blueprint’ which captures and communicates where and how the power of your most competitive assets and cross-functional expertise is best applied, in order to have the greatest ‘effect’ (i.e., a change in the world which benefits you).

In pharma, the greatest value of a brand plan lies in its ability to align different expertise and resources behind a few strategic priorities or ‘effects’. The most effective plans will communicate the brand-specific challenges and opportunities which have the biggest impact on success. They will also ensure complete alignment of organisational investments, effort and expertise.

Consider the following examples of strategic priorities found in the main image to the right. One set summarises critical success factors (CSFs) from a global launch plan for a mass pharma market brand, the other strategic imperatives (SIs) from an affiliate-specific plan for an orphan-indicated brand (modified to ensure I don’t break the consultant code).

These strategic priorities would suggest that both brands need to align resources in exactly the same way to be successful. But can that really be the case? Can a global mass-market launch product face exactly the same challenges as an affiliate orphan brand and need to use resources in the same way? I can’t imagine they do and know they don’t.                 

These statements are not wrong, they just aren’t useful. Because pharma has got into the habit of ‘doing’ planning rather than using planning, many plans developed today look the same. If they all look the same, then surely they are failing to capture and communicate the specific blueprint which outlines the best application of a firm’s most competitive assets and cross-functional expertise.

Where does pharma marketing go wrong?

For too many organisations, a brand plan is a set of detailed slides shared as a template presentation with three standard elements: A long showcase of all the market research in which the team has invested.

A random summary of the situation captured in a SWOT grid, followed by an unrelated list of obvious Critical Success Factors (CSF)/Sis. These CSFs/SIs often avoid communication of choice, direction or priority, usually stating a need to focus on everything.

How many times have we seen statements such as ‘optimise market access’, ‘leverage efficacy’ and ‘improve duration of treatment’? They’re hard to disagree with, but not exactly directive about what would really accelerate success.

•  A list of all the ‘innovative’ campaigns and digital ideas that our creative agencies have proposed as well as our intended budget for congresses.

How has this happened? While overall the concept of planning is valued, there has been continuous dilution in utility of planning. One trend shaping this has been the way plans are reviewed and measured. In review, if leaders shortcut to discussions on headline numbers and their opinions on big-ticket tactical investments, then they don’t critique and challenge the rationale behind priorities and choice.

This leads teams to feel it is more important to provide plans focused on forecasts and creative tactics. This approach also emphasises measurement of macro-metrics such as overall revenue or market share and micro-indicators of tactic delivery.

While I don’t deny these metrics are vital, on their own they make it hard to link performance to what is working in the plan and difficult to show good versus poor thinking in the short-term. As a result, the link between intention and performance becomes tenuous – particularly if the success of the plan has not been measured on a regular basis.

The result is a retrospective debate at the end of the year, the length and intensity of which is linked to whether the brand hit target or not. And, because plans aren’t being examined and the actual results analysed in detail, there is no perceived need to develop the plans with detail. The result? Vague plans which all look the same.

The other key trend shaping this dilution of understanding is a pandemic of teams ‘doing’, not using, planning tools. The most obvious cause of this is planning by template. Picture the scene: the commercial excellence function has just ‘updated’ planning templates, again. Based on feedback from last year, the boxes are slightly bigger and include a ‘novel’ supply chain tool that will help characterise the customer interactions from pack to patient.

By restricting planning to filling out templates, team effort goes into re-formatting market research slides to suit the template, spending time working out what the three words are which entirely capture each CSF and cramming the detail of any creative tactics into the two sentences allowed in the defined boxes. While templates have a very important role in capturing and aligning quality outputs of thinking, the size of a box should never dictate and restrict plan development or communications.

A subtler challenge is the recognition that developing strategy takes time and requires specific skills to get usable outputs from planning tools. Increasingly, we build plans as cross-functional teams. This is recognised as best practice as it brings consideration of specialist expertise and customer understanding.

However, building strategy is a specialist skill in itself, requiring education and practice. Experts have the ability to diagnose very specific challenges in the market. They clearly identify and quantify where business is at risk or where there is potential uplift. And their arguments weave a ‘red line’ of logic from business in the market landscape directly to the rationale for any investments.

This requires confidence to make choices – which parts of the market to focus on, which brand messages to communicate – and not go for everything. You can only make these choices when you are confident in your understanding.

While companies do put marketing excellence training in place to address this, developing these skills takes more than a few workshop sessions and some self-directed learning. The result is an industry of cross-functional teams that know the meaning of SWOT, have chanted SMART to the lead of a hundred different trainers and will comment that they prefer LePEST, STEEPLE or PESTLE.

The problem is, while everyone is discussing what the acronyms mean, there is a limited understanding or maybe consideration of how best to use the underlying tools. Take SWOT for example. Everyone, regardless of marketing background, is able to tell you what SWOT stands for: most plans include one.

They will also confirm that S and W are internal, O and T external. They may even advise you they prefer TOWS or OTSW to ensure external consideration first. But when asked to define the purpose of SWOT, or to outline how to use SWOT as a decision-making tool, they often struggle.

The first challenge with SWOT is the ability to develop usable content. Teams easily define an opportunity as an external factor, but aren’t clear how to capture one in a way that is usable in SWOT. Opportunity in particular is often the most misrepresented component.

The way teams discuss and write opportunities results in a convenient shortcut of the entire planning process. “There is an opportunity for us to…” is naturally followed by ‘…do’, as in: “There is an opportunity for us to do medical education around disease awareness.” By writing in this way, our list of opportunities has become a wish list of tactics.

Without needing to go through a decision-making process on strategic priorities or the rest of the planning approach, investment in the tactics you prefer has been justified. Clever.

Secondly, even with better, more usable content, to help define strategic priorities through SWOT, teams need to be able to align external opportunities and threats with internal competitive capabilities. Being able to look at the business and objectively see both the way the world is, and how well we compete in that world, means we can see where we are best (and least) suited to win.

Only at this point can teams see the choices which define where could be most appropriate to focus – to apply the ‘power’ – or avoid where we are not suited to win. They can then focus thinking on understanding the single-minded issue behind those choices. These single-minded issues in turn become the priorities for aligned resources to address otherwise known as CSFs or SIs.

Probably the single most used communication tool from any brand plan. CSFs and SIs capture what must be achieved for a strategy to succeed. They define where efforts for brand success will have the greatest effect and must focus in order to harness organisational and brand power.

Better CSFs/SIs are directional, leaving little to the imagination and clearly instructing different expert functions towards what their activities must achieve. But often they aren’t used to their full potential.

Here are some actual SIs that I’ve seen used to communicate brand plan intentions recently:

•  Optimise market access

•  Establish clear differentiation

•  Become the partner company of choice

•  Drive adherence.

The first example simply means ‘make market access better’, which I am sure is true. However, it fails to identify the problem with market access that cross-functional experts need to know to address. Similarly, with the second SI, in competitive markets it is highly likely that we will need to ‘establish clear differentiation’.

But the key question is: what is the anchor on which we have decided that we can successfully differentiate? Are we differentiating on a fast onset of action, a novel, more convenient delivery, or an amazing overall survival or progression-free survival?

The problem with vague catch-all CSFs/SIs is that they offer no direction to their audience. Without understanding what CSFs/SIs really mean, people will interpret what is required themselves. This lack of clarity leads to a lack of alignment, and the lack of alignment to a lack of efficiency in any brand plan.

How to improve pharma brand planning

•  Be clear on the value and purpose of the brand plan

The brand plan has several jobs for several audiences. It is a repository to capture in detail the situation at a point in time. It is a business case for strategic decisions showing why they are essential. This case is made by clearly linking tactics to the ‘effect’ they will have in the landscape, which supports brand success.

The brand plan is also a communication tool, which ensures alignment of all contributing functions. By communicating clear direction, teams can then harness the power of specialist experts where it has the greatest effect.

•  Focus on the power of specificity

By being specific in communications and in diagnosis, plans can avoid misinterpretation, ensure better alignment and lead to greater efficiency of investment. Understanding the importance of asking ‘why?’ – both when thinking about the situation and thinking about what we are planning to do – is a great test to check specificity.

•  Use planning tools, don’t just ‘do’ them

Brand plans are made up of components which all connect and build on one another. These components are often associated with a well-established tool, although these tools become pointless unless the outputs developed at each stage are usable in the next. Pay attention to ensuring that when you use PESTLE, SWOT or Porter’s Five Forces, it adds to the planning approach.

We all do brand planning. We understand the concept of why we need to plan. However, because of the way that leadership has been choosing to review plans and the pandemic of corporate preference for templates, we have lost focus on how best to use the planning tools available to us.

Too many teams, despite best intentions, develop plans which are inefficient and have outputs which aren’t worth the hours invested. When looking at plans, have you considered why you are developing them? Is your output a detailed blueprint which captures and communicates where and how different organisational expertise and resources are best applied to have the biggest impact on success?

Only by challenging the relevance and utility of our plans will we start avoiding hours spent making them generic, inefficient and non-competitive.

Michael Craig is an associate partner at the MSI Consultancy.