Brand managers have to invest a huge amount of time every year preparing brand plans – but all too often they have to do this without really knowing what actually drives the business or what really worked last time. Sometimes this is about a lack of market insight – but more often it’s due to not having the time efficient tools to rapidly frame the strategic implications of the information they have, or quantify what to do about it.

In addition, it is common practice for financial targets to be set from on high and marketers then propose how they intend to spend this budget to get there. The problem is that in reality the plan then rarely bears a direct relation to the forecast. If the target changes, the plan rarely does. Marketers just do their best given what they know, which if they don’t know specifically what drives the business, does not give them 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 ‘the plan has no clothes’.

So is this seemingly haphazard approach just the problem that as marketers we 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 conceive how they might take it on. Others have tried and tell stories of data analysis that equate to trying to boil the ocean. But, anyone who knows the old adage about ‘how you eat an elephant’, knows that to make it manageable you have to break it into bite size chunks!

So how do we do this? Fortunately, something has changed since your boss’s boss was a marketer…technology! There are now simple online software tools we can use to help us, that break this complex and seemingly ‘elephant sized’ process into bite size chunks. The tools available mirror a tried and tested ROI thinking process that we have used in the industry for a few years now, but take out the grind and calculation pains of doing it. As illustrated below in this end output showing the returns by activity.

However, before we discuss these tools, let’s first dispel the myth that you need cartloads of data to undertake effective resource optimization. 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 learnt intuition. Likewise, putting your money where you’ll get the biggest bang for your buck doesn’t always require lots of data or the building of some huge mathematical ROI model. By breaking down the link between what you spend and what you earn into bite size chunks, you can make reasonable estimates that give you good visibility 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 be going.

Here are five bite size chunks to help you eat that elephant…

1.    Focus on the REAL opportunity

2.    Concentrate on the REAL CSFs

3.    Check that your tactical objectives are truly SMART

4.    Ensure your Market Research Manager is actively tracking the KPIs that really matter

5.    Make sure you are spending the right amount on the right initiatives

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: Concentrate on the REAL CSFs?

The key to this chunk is to have a view on where revenue is most likely to be generated and what are the barriers of growth that need to be overcome. A question you need to ask yourself is ‘what are the critical things that need to happen to overcome these bottlenecks and drive growth?’ While we all like an easy life, 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 play one step ahead rather than sitting back and hoping that things will stay the same.

For example, a few years ago Plavix (clopidogrel) had exhausted the % 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 Rx! 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 5 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 % uplift possible in the planning period e.g. it may not be possible to significantly impact bottlenecks higher up the patient flow, such as % 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. % 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: ‘% 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 by the type of activity you are undertaking. A general 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 within a year increase GPs repeat scripts if you already have a large GP sales force 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 e.g. partnerships with stent manufacturers, facilitation of guidelines etc. Therefore, to increase the patient pool might take years before you bear 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 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 eg 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: Ensure your Market Research Manager is actively tracking the KPIs that really matter

We all get very used to tracking the same data month after month and reassure ourselves that some of it must being doing some good. After all, you show those same graphs to everyone and everyone else shows you theirs, so there must be something in it. If this sounds all too 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 check to do:

List out all your tactical objectives and write 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 to look into which of these they are tracking for you and subsequently, what other superfluous data they are also tracking for you. Then, when they come back to tell you that they are only tracking half of what actually matters, ask them to cut any superfluous data that doesn’t relate to your tactical objectives and your plan, and spend the savings on measuring things that do matter. 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, as well as reduce the number of graphs in your presentations.  And even better still, involve your Market Research Manager in helping to set the KPIs in the first place.

Chunk 5: Make sure you are spending the right amount on the right initiatives

Our first chunk gave you a rule of thumb view of misalignment and how to improve resource allocation. However, true optimization 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, as illustrated below:

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 smaller, bite size chunks as illustrated above, we can make the planning process a much more accurate and scientific process with an infinitely better outcome.  Rather than relying on our gut instinct ignoring the ‘elephant in the room’ where we might be avoiding 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!

About the author

Alex Blyth is Managing Director of Cello Business Sciences.

The rise of e-channels in pharmaceutical marketing have given rise to a renewed focus on tracking effectiveness – because these are perceived to be a part of the marketing mix which is easily measured.  As a result, those responsible for e-channels are often to be found leading the way in driving forward ROI tracking.

But there is no value in simply tracking one channel when you have nothing else to compare it to.  How do you know whether to put more, or fewer, resources into that one channel than into another, if you don’t know what those other channels are delivering.

There has been much study into the add-on value that e-channels bring to a pharma marketing set-up, but increasingly the biggest effect they are having is to shine a spotlight on the inadequate ROI tracking right across the piece.  They have brought in a higher level of awareness of the need to track everything in order to monitor the effectiveness both of each individual channel, and of the whole.

It is interesting how much we at MSI are finding ourselves brought into an organisation as a result of a perceived need to build effectiveness monitoring processes for these new e-channels – then finding that task extended into improving ROI measurement in traditional, offline channels as well.

If e-channels have done nothing else, they have levered in a focus on more effective ROI measurement, which can only be a good thing for the whole of pharma marketing.

Measuring the Gaps

I would like to illustrate this by introducing you to a real-life case study where this happened.  Their situation is far from unique, and many of the learnings and models which we took away will surely have resonance with many other companies in the industry.

We were called in by a significant player in the industry, and one which has a range of brands in different therapeutic areas.  Like many, they had asked for help because they knew they had a measurement problem, and their perception was that this problem was in the new e-channels, presumably because they assumed that effective measurement was already happening in the more traditional areas of marketing.

Experience tells us that our first task should always be to ascertain the real extent and scope of the need, rather than how it is perceived by the in-house team, who with the best will in the world, may not be able to see the wood for the trees.  So we set about looking at areas where the measurement itself was insufficient, but also at how well they were using what information they did have to make decisions.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised by this, but the e-channels didn’t have a huge gap on the measurement side, although there were weaknesses in how they were using that information.  But the biggest measurement gaps were in HELMs (Health Economics Liaison Managers), MSL (Medical Science Liaison) and Med-Ed, although interestingly both HELMs and Med-Ed were making the best of the information they did have.

But in fact no single area was well covered off, and so the task quickly widened from looking at e-channels to creating a training deck which would help the team understand how they could improve their business planning and tracking to improve business performance.

Putting the Intelligence into Business

The relationship between business intelligence teams and teams of marketers is crucial here.  Traditionally the latter has regarded the former as mere information gatherers.  We figured out that they needed to be more than that, and we set about making them ‘Business Performance Champions’.  This use of language reflects an important difference: rather than just gathering information, they would become people who could use that information to help make the right decisions.

Three things needed to happen before we could make this work.  First, the business intelligence people needed to understand the marketing strategy side behind decision-making, which meant upskilling them.

Secondly, we had to give them the tools to do the job, which meant software which would enable them to properly analyse different scenarios and alternative resource allocation, using the information they had gathered.

But perhaps the biggest challenge was the cultural one.  Unfortunately, there is a tendency amongst marketers to regard business intelligence people as number-crunchers, and as such they don’t hold much sway in the marketing arena.  They are not seen as understanding the decisions; pharma tends to exist in a very two-dimensional world, where marketers do the thinking, and analysts do the numbers.

Once again we can learn from the business world outside pharma here.  The really successful people in top businesses are basically business minds.  They have both eyes open, whereas too often in pharma, the marketers have the left eye open and the business intelligence people have the right eye open.  To be a business performance champion you need both eyes open.

It sounds simple, but it’s not.  This is a significant cultural change for everyone, and that is not a ‘one hit’ task, it takes time.  It is all very well providing business intelligence people with the knowledge they needed to be performance champions, but that doesn’t overcome the frequent lack of confidence when it comes to sitting in a meeting with marketers, who often have a sales background, and are therefore generally articulate and persuasive people.

By contrast – and I accept this is a generalisation – business intelligence people often went into that field because they are most comfortable with numbers and analysis.  This can mean that in a group situation, the dynamic sometimes works against them.  Inevitably, decisions are made on the basis of who sounds most convincing.

So we set about trying to get the business intelligence people to puff their chests out a little bit and be more confident – and to persuade marketers to accept that and listen.  And that is quite a big cultural change!

The Tools for the Job

Getting the two teams to accept the need for better measurement and work together to drive business performance was one thing; providing them with the processes and tools to do it was quite another.  Essentially we had to guide both teams how to quantify the returns of different strategies and Critical Success Factors (CSFs); then we had to develop SMART tactical objectives to realise those opportunities; and then track and optimise the campaigns.

To make sense of this, we broke down the plan into key areas for excellence, so that we could identify the gaps against what might be termed best practice.  We came up with six of these key areas for excellence, and identified what best practice looked like in each:

1. Review the previous plan: Planning should start with a review and learning from the last plan, and include metrics quantifying where you are against where you can realistically go.
2. Track what is relevant to CSFs: The plan should quantify strategic objectives you realistically want to achieve, as well as what channels and KPIs will help you get there.
3. Tactical objectives: Use SMART tactical objectives that link CSFs to key programmes in a measurable way.
4. Tracking: Consistent tracking, and acting on key metrics using champion-advised approach, with key review points.
5. Reporting and analysis tools: Consistent, simple reporting tools should show the returns of different CSFs, tactical objectives and key programmes – to show what’s working.
6. Outputs for decision-making and optimisation: The plan needs to provide a business case showing the returns of different CSFs, tactical objectives and key programmes – and that they are optimal.

One of the major problems we discovered when comparing actual practice against best practice revolved around the CSFs.  The company was struggling with these, because they often had CSFs which were overlapping each other, so they couldn’t kill one thing and put resource into another, because they were all interlinked.

Often too they were working up and down the patient flow with each CSF – it wasn’t linked to a specific point in the patient flow  This meant that they had kept the same CSFs in place for four year, because no-one could argue to kill any of them off.

The other major issue was that they had no way of putting SMART tactical objectives in place.  Because all they were really using were the sales and market share numbers – which of course can be influenced by all sorts of factors – they didn’t actually know whether their marketing strategy was performing well or badly.

This is not uncommon, and the imperative here is to understand the SMART tactical objectives so that you can break down the ‘elephant’ and see just the bit that is relevant to the programmes you are running, without interference from other, external factors.

From all of this we developed what we called the ‘Circle of Success for Tracking and Planning’, which showed in a graphic way the circular nature of what we were trying to achieve (figure 1).

Figure One

Success Gates

Of course, it is unrealistic to change from a situation where there are so many gaps to one where best practice is being carried out across the board, and so we came up with a system to identify the priority areas for action.  For each of the five boxes in the Circle of Success, we identified a number of ‘Success Gates’ – lists of things which needed to be done to achieve success in each box.

So, for example, the box called ‘Identify CSFs and channel Focus’ had four actions: putting an underlying forecast in place, quantifying the impact of external environmental factors, estimating the potential marketing uplift and identifying CSFs.  For each action, we gave a traffic light colour: green meant best practice was being achieved (there weren’t many of these); amber was an 80% ‘good enough’ (for now; and red was where urgent action was required.

This we were able to agree what was an acceptable level of success in year one, year two, and so on, until all the Success Gate flags were green.  It’s important to set realistic targets within a particular timescale, if you try and do everything immediately you are doomed to failure.  In this way, you can work out the important things which you absolutely must do from day one.

Robust Metrics

Having put together a pre-defined metrics guide and conducted a gap analysis, we ended up focussing on five channels that the company really needed to drill down on – and only one of these was an e-channel.

It is interesting that the whole project started with a perception that the e-channels were not being properly tracked, and that in the end 80% of what we looked at were offline channels.  This is a key lesson: traditional channels need to learn from the closer concentration in e-channels on tracking and performance.

The new online channels have come along with their natural and intuitive focus on measurement – but these are in essence simply extra marketing channels, and it is pretty pointless putting all that effort into measuring ROI on the e-channels if you cannot compare their effectiveness with other parts of the marketing mix.  And to do that, you need robust metrics in place across the board.

The concept of Business Performance Champions has worked well, because the concentration of tracking does need to be driven internally, and no-one is in a better position to do that than business intelligence people, who have both the data and the objective overview in a way that the marketers who are delivering the channels do not.

It is certainly not simple to achieve that, though, as there is often a significant gap in understanding and even respect between the two.  Over time, the type of people pharma recruits into business intelligence roles needs to change, so that they have a greater understanding of strategy, and a greater confidence to champion business performance.

But in the meantime, as we have demonstrated, it is possible to shift the culture and make it happen in existing organisational models, provided the focus is there, the processes are robust, and the people undertaking the task have the right tools to do the job.

It may have taken new e-channels to highlight the shortcomings in tracking marketing effectiveness in our industry – but the basic underlying cause of the problem is not new.  Online marketing may not the panacea for pharma – but if it shines the spotlight on measurement right across the marketing mix, it will certainly have had a positive effect.

About The Author

Alex Blyth is a Managing Consultant and Head of Marketing Sciences

Oringally published in Pharmafocus, May 2011

The glamour end of pharma marketing is undoubtedly around the launch of a new product.  Everyone is excited and optimistic, you certainly hope that what you are launching represents a step forward in treatment, and that clinicians will be intrigued and eager to try your new medicine.  Much gets written about how to make the launch a success, and rightly, because a solid platform for growth is crucial to achieving a return on the investment made in getting the drug to market.

For most marketers, of course, the more routine activity revolves around keeping that launch momentum going.  You can’t achieve that return in months, you needs several years of strong sales to succeed.  So what do you do if your product, even after a strong launch, starts to falter?  What should you do to arrest a slowdown in growth?  In short, how do you turnaround a flagging brand?

This is not an academic question.  With decreasing points of differentiation and increasing competition, this is a situation which pharma marketers will face more and more.  Of course, each case will be different; but there will be some common factors, and hence there are lessons we can learn from any given example.

So I’d like to introduce to you a real life case study, which in the interests of discretion I am going to call Brand X.  The name doesn’t matter; the case study provides an illuminating insight into the value of a strategic, hypothesis-driven, investigative approach to research over more traditional, broad market research – and the lessons that can be learnt in how pharma uses research to drive decision making.

Brand X was a new treatment for a specific type of cancer launched in a European market, and which 18 months post-launch was showing the symptoms of sub-optimal strategy and execution, both in terms of flattening growth and a high variance in the success that reps were experiencing.

Turning around a situation like this requires knowledge and insight into what is happening, why the brand is faltering, from which a strategy can be developed that will tackle the genuine issues, not just the ones which senior management’s ‘gut feeling’ says are causing the problems.  The difference, as we will see, can be significant.

So there are four stages to this kind of task.  First, we had to diagnose the issues holding back Brand X.  Then, we had to develop strategies to overcome those challenges.  Next comes the need to value the strategy uplift that is possible and the resource commitment required.  Finally, it is vital to present an evidence-based business case and ensure the seamless execution of the strategy.

Brand X had got their product to market a little quicker than a competitor’s product, but when the competitor did launch, they were better organised in coming to market.  So Brand X had the opportunity to be seen as first mover, but unless customers were both aware of them and had a positive view of them, they ran the danger of becoming the Betamax to their competitor’s VHS; and anyone over 40 will remember that although Betamax came first and was the better format, VHS achieved a critical mass and market ubiquity by putting effective marketing behind the product.

So what was going wrong?  The key to finding out was effective and insightful research.  Naturally, we started off with an internal workshop where we developed a number of hypotheses as to why the brand was flagging.  But that view was bound to be skewed, so we then went out into the field and attempted to validate those hypotheses by talking to current and former reps, urologists and key opinion leaders.

What became very clear was that the issues identified in the internal workshop were not validated by the field research, and that issues that senior management thought were holding the brand back did not seem to be the same ones that customers regarded as important.

Senior management seemed convinced that the failings were down to two main issues: ineffective execution in the field, and price.  Through the research, we were able to disprove some of the potential issues, for example value per patient not being maximised, compliance issues or simply not getting first patients on the product.

In the end the research uncovered a raft of key issues to address, and we categorised them into four sections: product  perception, organisation, market and strategy & execution.  This approach gave us a whole shopping list of factors to tackle.  Some of the organisational issues were particularly telling, and in many cases it was these which had not been identified internally.

Insufficient centrally-driven activity, poor communications, a too short-term mindset and a lack of investment in becoming a ‘urologists’ company’ all pointed to some key failings which had little to do with rep performance itself – giving the lie to the MD’s initial assertion that “the problem is in the field!”

That said, there were some issues with the product itself.  Not fatal ones, but ones which required a different approach in order to play to the product’s real strengths.

One perceived disadvantage is that Brand X has a more regular depot.  Because of this, the only urologists who liked Brand X were those who liked to see certain types of patients more regularly anyway – others saw it as an unnecessary strain on resources in the surgery and an inconvenience for the patient, who is reminded of their cancer monthly.  The answer to this is to identify the kind of patients who need to be seen monthly, such as newly-diagnosed patients requiring more advice, or anxious patients requiring more support, as well as those who visit the surgery more regularly for  other treatments.  Equally, identifying doctors who are more holistic-type treaters, the kind of doctors who like to keep a close eye on their patients anyway.  In this way, you start to turn a perceived inconvenience into a competitive advantage.

Conversely, one of what the company saw as the product’s big advantage – that it could be used straight away without the need for pre-treatment agents – turned out not to be much of an advantage, simply because the health system in Brand X’s market moved so slowly in any case.  So selling to this supposed advantage was not going to be effective.

So if the product itself was neither the cause of flagging sales nor presenting a particular point of competitive differentiation, what of the market?  This is a market where not much had changed in a long time, so doctors’ choice was amongst products which were pretty much all the same.  It became clear that they were most likely to use the one sold by the rep they liked most.

This meant that the company had to own the reps who owned the relationships, and particularly those who had existing relationships with high prescribers.  This would require consistent and continuous contact, and support for training, seminars and congresses.  In this way, relationships could then be leveraged to get business with new clients.

Again, the research had identified a potential problem in achieving this: because of limited investment and a lack of consistent effort, the company was not viewed as a urology partner, driven by poor geographical coverage of reps, frequently changing personnel both in the front line and at HQ, and the absence of a centrally-driven strategy.

As a company, they were failing to gain traction.  They were not seen as a long-term partner, but rather as people who were there to make a quick buck – that phrase was actually used, unprompted, by one of the urologists the research targeted.  And that rather suggested that the whole culture of the organisation was awry, something which inevitably had not come out in the internal workshop!

Lack of communication aggravated the problem.  The reps felt ignored and unrecognised, in truth they didn’t really believe in the product proposition and especially not in their company – a situation not helped by the fact that two sales managers had been fired within 18 months, again focusing on the symptom of the underlying problems in the organisations attitude to investment in the area and lacking a credible proposition in the market.

A study of the adoption ladder backed up the fact that an unmotivated sales force was not performing.  Nearly 30% of doctors visited were not able to remember the product (!), and then 50% of doctors who did try the product in a small number of patients did not end up using again.  A lot of that was down to the reps not getting them to try the product with the right patients.  In essence, it was being used as a last resort, and it is hard to win in that situation.  Being positioned as last resort means that when your product is used, it’s probably not going to work.

So a key task was to get the drug prescribed for the right kind of patients, playing to its strengths, so that doctors would see the benefit of using it.  The company had been obsessed with pushing benefits such as the fact there was no need for multi-therapy, price, and the reputation of the company; but the research showed that these were either of little importance, or not areas in which Brand X could effectively compete.  By concentrating on control, the level and speed of testosterone reduction, and the good side effect profile, the company would be able to present compelling arguments which actually mattered to the clinicians in certain patient management situations. They could win a valuable segment if they would only give-up trying to change behaviours to win the whole market off an attribute that was of little significance in most situations.

Perhaps the most serious shortcoming that the research identified was a lack of investment, which meant that resources were being stretched too thinly to build relationships that could deliver.  Although this had been a fundamental weakness which had allowed a competitor to muscle in on the market, it wasn’t necessarily simply a question of throwing new resource, but rather of marshalling what resources could be afforded more effectively on the segment they were credible to win in.

We recommended targeting urologists who wanted to ‘make a difference’ to patients, who should be seen more frequently anyway, by giving them rapid control of the disease. Recommendations included building regional centres of excellence (we called them ‘strongholds’), where Brand X could make itself impenetrable to the competition.  Built around KOLs who would support the brand, these specialist strongholds could then be used as a base to ‘fight out’ of into other hospitals.

Coupled with this was the recommendation to allow investment to be correctly directed locally around a global agreed positioning strategy. Included in this was to create Regional Development Directors, who would have the autonomy and the authority to make sweeping changes locally.  This way, if  something out of the ordinary was required in the field, rather than the normal delay while the investment decision went right back up the chain, it could be made quickly by someone holding a local kitty to support the stronghold.

The lesson here for any pharma marketer is that you should never assume that your hypothesis about why a brand is flagging are correct.  In Brand X’s case, the original hypothesis was that the price was too high, and therefore competition was causing them to struggle.  Whilst there were some elements of truth in that, it was missing the vital truth: the corporate strategy was undermining the business.

Serious organisational issues can be missed in the early months of launch when you have no competition, however once competitor did come along the brand’s success was compromised.  Their survival had been due to lack of competition, which had blinded the company to ongoing failings.

At the very top level there was a need for some serious investment, to get solid structures in place, and a constant viable strategy – which they needed to keep to – which played to the strengths of the product, and recognised that they couldn’t have every patient.

All of this only became clear because we challenged the company’s own hypotheses, and then tested and validated them with quality research.  Trying to put together an action plan to turn around a brand without having that kind of insight into the issues is a sure-fire route to failure – without objective evidence you would just be another voice in a room.

Too often decision making in pharma is driven by hunches, wishful thinking or just plain guesswork.  It doesn’t need to be like this; the best decisions are always taken on the basis of testing those hunches, gaining fresh insight and letting the evidence decide.

About The Author

Alex Blyth is a Managing Consultant and Head of Marketing Sciences.

Originally published in Pharmafocus, February 2011

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Just like most specialisms, marketing, and especially pharma marketing, has its fair share of jargon.  Whilst this can sometimes be a useful shorthand, too often such phrases are used with little understanding as to their true meaning and implications. Read More…

Portfolio planning should be a practical process that delivers a programme of work to take you to sunnier shores. All too often portfolio planning is an elaborate laborious process that is carried out every few years and then slowly forgotten just in time to start afresh a few years later with a different group of managers and no doubt a different consultancy.

Portfolio planning should not be massively time and resource hungry since it is when you have the least of these that you need it most, e.g. when a key product fails for example, and crisis management takes over.

So what is the most appropriate way of practical portfolio planning in a time and resource efficient manner?

Let’s take a brief look at the five key steps:

1. What’s the challenge ahead
2. Where do we want to be
3. What’s stopping us getting there
4. What’s required
5. How do we do it

What’s the challenge ahead

We need to focus on where are we now and what do we face in the future? However, we are commonly all too aware of the current situation and the issues we face but that fixation can blind us to what lurks around the corner.

The future factors that require consideration that may come into play fit into 3 areas:

1. Pre-determined inevitable truths (e.g. loss of patent)
2. Uncertainties you think might be coming (e.g. pipeline product fails to get authorisation, existing key brand is challenged by NICE, new products cannibalising existing products)
3. Blind spots you don’t yet know are coming (e.g. the unforeseen depth of the credit crunch)

The Pre-determined and Uncertainties can be built into different possible ‘Futures’ that the company needs to allow for, if it is to a have a future-proofed portfolio strategy. Brainstorming possible futures also allows us to hypothesise possible Blind Spots that might be unlikely but devastating to the current plan. For example, the collapse of the availability of credit and funding in the current climate for biotech’s may yet be felt by an industry that has become dependent on making up for failing pipeline through in-licensing. Yet would we ever have anticipated that situation 2 years ago? Probably not, without a lot of future gazing. How these ‘Futures’ potentially impact on the company can then be understood and the future key success factors for the company identified.

We can then apply this process one level down to assess the therapy areas that are of potential interest/opportunity. The attractiveness of therapy areas can be assessed in light of the threats and opportunities for the each therapy area under the different possible ‘Futures’. The other axis to consider is the companies currently projected capability to compete in each area given the planned products and resources.

Where we want to be

Within this scope of expected future key changes we can then clearly envisage where we want to be in that future – the strategic vision.

The vision needs to give clear guidance to the product portfolio selection process. So to be a top 10 Pharma Company in all major markets is good to have as a vision, but is of limited value to guiding the portfolio planning process. You need to be more specific in the strategic vision, such as what therapy areas you will dominate in or the types of therapeutic you focus on (e.g. biologics, small molecule, genotype specific drugs, orphan drugs, new classes).

What’s stopping us

Question what is it about our currently planned product range (in-license and pipeline) that is insufficient to enable us to achieving these aspirations?

If you plan to dominate certain therapy areas, are your current and future products going to work in harmony together or is their a risk of cannibalisation? Market segmentation is critical to understanding which segment is best served by which of your products so that you can position each of your products to have its own space. The financial returns of a harmonious product portfolio strategy by therapy area can then be forecast through wrapping up the penetration by sized segment.

What’s required

By having a clear understanding of where the company can go in each therapy area we begin to understand what is required to get there. Some products can just be repositioned through marketing perception; others will require further clinical trials or development of health economic evidence to give them the power to cultivate a credible positioning in the target segments evaluated.

Certain segments will be identified as attractive but inaccessible with the current product range. This directs your in-licensing and clinical development teams to the target product profiles that meet the needs of the unserved segments, to allow a more dominant position across the therapy area.

How do we do it

Once confirmed, therapy area strategies can then be translated into effective brand plans that define what we are going to say and do to develop and promote the product. By working this through we can start to involve the wider organisation in investigating the individual elements of the portfolio plan. A detailed due diligence process.

By consolidating the costs of the proposed plans individually by brand plus identifying the company structures and resource required to support them, we can see the financial attractiveness of not just one product relative to another but crucially one therapy area relative to another. By then taking the Net Present Values (NPVs) of each therapy area we are positioned to optimize what time, resource and investment should be committed to each therapy area (given the product arsenal within it), and then how that breaks down by product.

This stepwise process is a practical way to envisage the future whilst keeping an unswerving focus on the customer segments you service, rather than being a servant to the products you find yourself with.

The Author

Alex Blyth is a managing consultant with The MSI Consultancy.

Originally published in Pharmafocus, March 2009

Much ink has been spilt about the importance of measuring return on investment on marketing activity in the pharma industry – and yet, as Alex Blyth argues, the concept is not yet fully ingrained as part of the culture.

If I was to tell you that I could offer you a proven set of tools and techniques which you could use to undertake an assessment of your brand’s marketing plan, and optimise it with the result that sales increased by anything up to 50 per cent, within the same budget, what would your reaction be? Perhaps you might be cynical at first. But if I could prove that it works, not in theory, but by demonstrating successful case studies, then what would your reaction be?

Given how much marketing ROI has been spoken about over the past few years, I would expect you to be beating a path to my door. And to be fair, increasingly that is happening (because, yes I have those tools and techniques). But there is something which holds many pharma companies back from embracing such an obvious benefit – and I think I know what it is.

It’s a cultural issue – and it needs to change, if as an industry we are going to seize the opportunities which evolving markets are presenting us, and if we are to remain competitive in a marketplace where there are no longer any easy pickings.

The problem as I see it is that in major pharmaceutical corporations, the culture which predominates is that of making decisions based on what I would term Career Returns on Effort, rather than Corporate Return on Investment. If these two concepts were aligned, and had similar outcomes, then that would be fine – but they are not. In fact, in the current climate where ‘keeping up appearances’ can be more important than necessarily delivering better results, then I would argue that the two concepts are clearly opposed.

Let’s be honest: undertaking an analysis of your marketing plan to date may just show that you have not been making the budget you have been allocated work as hard as it could have for the brand. Now from a company point of view, that’s a really useful piece of analysis, because it is the start-point for driving a better return for the investment in time, resources, people, effort and money which is poured into marketing.

Unfortunately too many marketers view this as exposing themselves to criticism, and would rather just keep making the same resource allocations: no questions asked, the appearance of doing the right things maintained! Why? Because nobody is counting!

If we accept this picture, it’s clearly a flawed culture. The big question is: how do we change it?

The Reality Chasm

The big challenge in pharma marketing is that we don’t have a ‘tracking returns’ culture. Most brand teams do not reliably track the real impact on sales of past campaigns, for the simple reason that no-one in a senior position is insisting they do. Consequently, we create a culture where it is acceptable to not worry about the robustness of newly-proposed marketing campaigns – because nobody is going to check those either.

There is a huge gap between talk and action here. CEOs talk to shareholders about continuing to drive shareholder value in tough times, and yet on the ground, with brand managers it can be a story of spending what you feel makes sense – and you’ll only face awkward questions if sales go south, or you go over budget.

The result is a huge reality chasm between the company image and the internal reality. As a consultant looking in from the outside, you see this far too often.

If I was a shareholder I’d be outraged at this. Is this really a culture that delivers shareholder value? I suspect that if shareholders were asked if pharma marketers should be doing an ROI analysis on their marketing plans as standard practice they would do two things: gawp in disbelief that it isn’t already, and then bark the order to ‘Do it!’

Sometimes I dream about what would happen if Amstrad boss and The Apprentice supremo Sir Alan Sugar – famous for his loathing of ‘corporate types’ – were running a pharma company, and became aware that the returns on spending were not being tracked. Only one phrase would be reverberating off the expensive glass atrium walls: “You’re Fired!” Perhaps not touchy-feely, modern management, but just the kind of kick up the backside that can stimulate cultural change when it’s needed most.

There is what economists sometimes call a Principal-Agent information gap in pharma, that urgently needs resolving. Shareholders (the principal) do not ask about how decisions are made, and the company management (the agent) glosses over the disturbing reality that decisions in marketing are rarely based on delivering value – but rather on gut feel and what is perceived to be good for careers.

I use the word ‘perceived’, because in the long-run with this kind of decision-making we all lose. The days of plenty are long gone, and even if there once was a so-called Golden Age when we could afford to be sloppy with how we spent our resources, that is no longer the case, nor should it ever have been. Not only do poor decisions fail to maximise company value for shareholders, they also stifle employment, salaries and investment in R&D, arguably the lifeblood of our future.

You see the thing is, we are all in this together. What is good for shareholders is also good for employees, at least in everything other than the very short run. If you want a successful and long-lived career in pharma you have to accept that point. It’s time to stop being defensive and viewing ROI assessment and maximise techniques as something to be feared. They are good news, and in the present climate the only way that pharma marketers can guarantee a future for themselves. It’s time to change.

Striving For Constant Improvement

So what can be done? How can we create a culture of challenge and constant improvement? What changes have to happen in the mindsets of both marketers and senior managers if we are to bring about this win-win situation where properly assessed marketing plans lead to added shareholder value and brighter futures for marketers?

As with any cultural change, it has to start with an adjustment of mentality. Even if you have the most suitable marketing plan now, there has to be an acceptance that nothing is optimal for ever. Therefore it stands to reason that if a brand manager has not recently changed what they do and where they are spending their resources, it is not because they are good at what they do – it’s because they are oblivious to potential improvements.

Planning should improve the closer you get to the event. So if you cannot update your long-term strategy with annual (or more frequent) refinements to your tactics, you might as well live 10,000 feet up on a cloud.

There needs to be a recognition as well that a combination of competitor response and customer fatigue mean that you simply cannot keep doing and saying the same thing and expect the same results. Sooner or later it will stop working, or at least work less well. And certainly not work as well as it could.

It is vital that management instil the thinking that changing plans is not about admitting error, but striving for constant improvement, something which should be commended, not condemned. They need to recognise that a static plan lives in a drawer devoid of learning, by promoting those who show real added value by doing things differently, rather than those who just carry on with what the previous brand managers put in place, and inherit their success – however limited that might be.

The second cultural shift has to be the valuing of business intelligence. How often have you seen brand managers bluffing their way through the need to build an evidence-based plan by suggesting that ROI can’t be correctly calculated – so it’s not worth doing at all.

Our ROI-friendly culture has to recognise that in an imperfect world, a better result can be achieved with imperfect information than in total ignorance. Provided that you have 90 per cent confidence that an activity is at least going to break even, then resourcing decisions are about the relative returns of one activity over another.

So if you have 25 per cent margin of error around the expected returns of activity A and activity B, but activity B suggests double the ROI of activity A, you would expect to spend at least double on activity B than on activity A – or more, depending on the diminishing returns seen in activity B. Yet we commonly see marketers splitting their spending equally on A and B in comparable situations, even based on their assumptions of returns. Which suggests not just insufficient data, but a simple refusal to even try and work it out.

At the risk of sounding Donald Rumsfeld-esque, a brand manager who knows what they do not know is better than a brand manager who does not know what they don’t know, in that the former can look to validate their judgement, whilst the latter is doomed to ignorance.

The logical corollary to this is that an ROI analysis of a brand can be undertaken relatively quickly when you’re working with a brand manager who has the maturity and confidence to estimate what they do know and recognise what they do not know. The analyst is then able to work with business intelligence to use historical data to identify what has proven possible in the past, to validate what is realistic to achieve in the future.

Strive, Challenge, Thrive

It is not an exaggeration to assert that the future survival, prosperity and growth of the pharma industry is dependent on creating and nurturing leaders who deliver return on investment. But getting to this point requires a major cultural shift within organisations to recognise the value that applying rigorous ROI assessment techniques to marketing plans.

Crucially, there has to be a recognition that Return on Investment Marketing can and does deliver a Career Return on Effort, and an ROI culture makes this happen by rewarding those who adopt an entrepreneurial attitude and who demonstrate better plans and optimised resource allocations. The first step in this great leap forwards is for Brand Teams to strive to track the KPIs that are relevant to the area of opportunity they are focusing on, rather than the IMS data that business intelligence has to hand. I think we could all live a little happier for not seeing endless slides of seemingly compulsory, yet strategically irrelevant, IMS graphs in Marketing Plans.

Create a culture of ‘Strive, Challenge, Thrive,’, and you create that happy situation whereby both shareholders and marketers enjoy the tangible returns on their own investment of money and time respectively.

The Author

Alex Blyth is a Senior Consultant with The MSI Consultancy.

Article originally published in Pharmaceutical Marketing Europe, October 2008

In the first of a three-part series, Alex Blyth from The MSI Consultancy introduces a novel solution to the age-old problem of finding ways to deliver growth across a portfolio of in market brands.

Pharma marketing managers often find themselves having to deliver growth across their brands which has been promised – either externally (for example to stakeholders), or to meet internal expectations. Whilst these predictions are sometimes made more with delighting the audience in mind rather than reflecting the true potential of a brand, the marketer nevertheless faces this ‘Growth Gap’.

Whether it’s at portfolio level across the whole pharma company, or at business unit level across a product range, meeting these raised expectations is often one of the hardest tasks a pharma marketer can face. How can you identify opportunities for growth which may have been missed, and how can you ‘rev up’ opportunities and measure them to ensure they maximise the potential for growth?

As so often happens in marketing, the answer lies in taking a rigorous scientific approach, or rather combining ‘art’ with that science to develop breakthrough formulas for success.

Sounds too good to be true? Over the next three months, I’ll be explaining how it can be done. And this isn’t just theory: in the final part of this series, I will use a real case study to show how this process helped to build a robust three year plan with a 71% sales increase – a planned ROI of over 200%!

The key to plugging the growth gap is what I call ‘Structured Ideas Management’ – which is where art meets science. First, scientific analysis tells us where the growth and innovation problems are; the ‘art’ is then in solving problems and creating better ways of doing things. Science then steps back in to help evaluate the opportunity to ensure that it will maximise the chance of success.

The basic premise is that by understanding the drivers behind commercial success, we can understand what is required to excel.

‘Structured Ideas Management’ may be a relatively new concept in our industry, but it is an accepted way of doing things in other sectors, especially in electronics and the automotive industry. As the name suggests, it creates a more structured environment than pure ‘Blue Sky’ brainstorming. By establishing the criteria for rejection of ideas first, it focuses the minds of the ideas generators.

It relies on an analysis of the existing business to establishing those factors with which you can screen out ideas that will not work: perhaps because they are not practical, or because they deliver too small a ROI, or simply because they don’t match the strategic objectives of the company. Or it might be simply that the organisation doesn’t have the capabilities to deliver a particular idea (and has no prospect of acquiring them).

By adopting a scientific approach, you can then identify the gap which exists in most organisations between the current planned growth plan (which will include natural underlying growth) and the target growth, which may have been expressed as much as an optimistic aspiration as a realistic goal!

By demonstrating a robust system of measurement, the pharma marketer can show whether they are maximising the ROI on current activity – as well as making the business case for why further investment is needed to plug the growth gap.

What is needed in such a situation is what I call ‘Growth Fuel’: it’s a tried and tested decision support process to help fill that gap. Whether it’s investigating the value of taking best practice from one market to another, or a way of revving up an existing plan, or implementing a step change and doing things fundamentally differently; Growth Fuel should secure management buy in to an objective, fair and robust process that does not create unnecessary work in chasing unrealistic aspirations.

Once the growth gap has been identified, the process of filling it with Growth Fuel essentially has three steps. First comes Opportunity Generation, in which identifying and developing opportunities for growth precedes screening out unviable ones. The second stage is Opportunity Assessment, a rigorous process which assesses the attractiveness and fit of each opportunity against a weighted set of criteria and objectively selects the financially attractive ones.

The last stage is Strategy and Execution, where strategic options are financially assessed and an optimal strategy and strong business case is built, before being implemented.

This Growth Gap Tool is a sophisticated, structured and transparent way of tackling a straightforward problem. Importantly, it maximises the chances of success, and removes much of the risk of unnecessary work and low returns which can come from trying out new ideas to achieve growth. It’s not a magic bullet – but it is a powerful way to plug that growth gap.

Next month: Generating opportunities for growth, and assessing their chances of success.

The Author

Alex Blyth is a Senior Consultant for The MSI Consultancy Ltd

Article originally published in Pharmaceutical Marketing, August 2007

Introducing some of the scientific rigour of the laboratory into using market intelligence can maximise the effectiveness of marketing decisions, and lend a structure to marketing creativity, argues Alex Blyth.

When it comes to developing their actual product, the pharmaceutical industry invests heavily in analytical tools to ensure that the fruits of their research meet critical clinical standards. Clearly, a pharma company would never rely on subjective opinion to gauge whether a product is safe or effective – that would be ethical, scientific and commercial suicide!

So why are so many marketing decisions, which will ultimately determine the success or failure of these products in the marketplace, taken with the reliance on underpowered research.

Gathering market intelligence is in itself an expensive business, so not using robust analytical processes to turn that raw data into the basis for sound decision-making is tantamount to tearing up pound notes and throwing them down the drain.

Even today, there are pharmaceutical marketers out there who undervalue research, regarding marketing as an ‘art’, reliant on flair to achieve success. But in all areas of marketing, from initial new product development through to tactical marketing communications, a balance of creativity and a methodical approach is needed.

And whilst at the tactical communications end this balance might sway more towards creativity, at the marketing planning stage the approach should definitely be more scientific.

Too many pharma marketers prefer to rely on selective data and assumptions to support critical decisions. But running with instinct and creativity without a sound scientific platform can be disastrous.

Panos Kontzalis, former President of EphMRA, described the ultimate goal of pharmaceutical market research as “to provide added value to the decision making process by delivering reliable and relevant information based on customer needs.” By adopting a scientific approach, this ‘added value’ can be maximised.

For most marketing strategy (and scientific) decision-making, it is not a case of proving one, single, correct solution. Rather, it’s about testing various hypotheses and deciding which one best fits the overall objectives and strategy of the company. The scientist will do just this, testing each hypothesis to see whether it stands up.

By contrast, marketers will too often start by making a decision, and then will undertake research to justify that decision. If the results of that research don’t support the initial course, the research can be sidelined or ignored. Alternatively research will be used purely to obtain information rather than as part of hypothesis testing.

A commonly held view is that market research is the ‘uncreative’ end of marketing, and that reliance (or as some would see it ‘over-reliance’) on its disciplines is somehow sterile and will stifle creativity, something which is (rightly) valued in the profession.

But in fact, the opposite is true. By analysing what has happened in the past and what drives current behaviour a scientific approach can identify what is needed for future success. However, just as in the laboratory, it takes a creative ‘stroke of genius’ to develop possible winning strategies to actually achieve it.

Creativity then needs to be tempered with scientific reality checks on whether a hypothesised strategy is viable and commercially worthwhile. In marketing planning, creativity is ‘the viscose sweet stuff’ you sandwich between slices of hard evidence-based direction and strategic validation. A sandwich that provides ‘structured creativity’.

There are many steps in the marketing planning process where ‘structured creativity’ can be applied to improve the competitive advantage and financial return that can be achieved from the resulting strategy.

Quantifying the critical success factors for winning in a market, and evaluating our relative capacity to fulfil them, will help us understand the expected commercial value of investing in a new product or a particular product strategy. To do this accurately requires a picture of the market to be built up segment by segment, and ’structured creativity’ has a big role to play in how those segments are divided and the competitive advantage that is gained from ‘cutting the cake a different way’.

Robust market research uncovers the different factors that could provide lines for segmenting the market. Creativity is required to see the market in a fresh light and to develop segmentation hypotheses. Scientific validation is then used to show that the new way of segmenting your market not only works but actually gives you enough of a competitive advantage and a return on investment to make it commercially worthwhile.

For example, if you are entering a market where the customer defines the patient segments by the severity of the disease, and you have entrenched competition in mild, moderate and severe… where do you go? The creative stroke is to turn the market on its head and get customers to see it another way that benefits you, them and the patient.

It may be that this comes in the form of a new may of segmenting patients by their aspirations (or those of their family and/or carer), life situation, quality of life etc. However, the creativity needs to balanced by the practicalities of proving that the segmentation model has clear ‘markers’ that can be used by customers and your sales teams to discriminate one segment from another and that your product is more likely to be prescribed when customers think of patients in this new way.

The next sandwich stage in the marketing planning process is identifying which segments you are actually playing for, and the strategy required to maximise your returns. A scientific approach is required to filter out non-winnable segments, and to prioritise where necessary. To win, your product and company profile will need to be able to outperform competitors and meet certain levels of performance in the Critical Success Factors (CSFs) for that specific segment (e.g. efficacy requirements, pricing levels, marketing budget requirements etc). However, to reach this stage we had to first start with a thorough understanding of what triggers customers to prescribe.

Understanding customer’s prescribing triggers is not just about what they are but how important each one is to achieving success in each segment. Robust quantitative research techniques, including the use of conjoint trade-off analysis, enables us to precisely understand how much impact each prescribing trigger can have and what levels of performance are required to not just meet customer needs but actually excel enough to win that type of customer..

The result is a Target Product Profile (TPP) for each segment that indicates the market potential for the ideal product to ‘win’ that segment and, by assessing your product’s profile against the TPP, the market potential for your product.

With the TPP telling us the likely returns from improving performance in any key areas, we are now in a position to make meaningful decisions about whether an investment is going to be worthwhile. Therefore, the TPP can helps us to more effectively direct the development of the product (e.g. clinical trial programmes), and develop more motivating combinations of messages to trigger prescribing change.

Once each segment is turned into a financial forecast using the TPP, patient flow dynamics and customers’ treatment behaviour can be modelled to help identify the possible levers of growth for each segment. The creative filling is in developing tactics that move on these levers of growth. Once again we sandwich this with hard market research to quantify how much the levers move, estimate the possible Return on Investment the proposed strategy could have and what the Critical Success Factors are.

As with many scientific approaches, all of this requires a level of knowledge and thinking which is not always immediately obvious. But whilst there is a place for instinct, flair, creativity – call it what you will – making decisions about new R&D initiatives towards commercial goals should only be made on the back of sound, robust information and analysis.

The adoption of a more scientific approach amongst those commissioning, carrying out and above all using market research will lead to better quality decision-making, and ultimately more commercial success. Marketing thinking on unsound foundations is doomed to failure, no matter how creative it might be; if we can create that structured creativity, we can ensure that we move forward with both flair and a sound basis for making commercial and marketing decisions.

The Author

Alex Blyth is a Consultant with The MSI Consultancy.