Knowing Your Market

A Head-to-Head feature with TARP and Connell + Associates

“Our services focus on ensuring that a brand’s strategy is speaking to the right target in a way that is relevant and uniquely compelling versus competition”
-Patty Klingbiel of Connell + Associates

NGP. What factors do pharmaceutical companies need to consider before undertaking a product launch or branding exercise?
GA. Every brand pharmaceutical product will experience an initial launch uptake phase, a more moderate growth phase and eventually a controlled – if you’ve prepared – decline phase. A comprehensive plan will include, but not be exclusive to, the following major considerations. In portfolio planning, what investments should be made across the company’s portfolio of products? In new product planning, what are the quantifiable opportunities that will determine resource allocation? In commercialization planning, what resources will be required to maximize the potentials of the prioritized opportunities?

In brand product management planning, what are the dynamics of the intended entry market and competitive product set? And what is the commercialization plan, at the operational level, that will be executed to ensure success? In contingency planning, how will unpredictably poor product performance be measured, reported on, diagnosed and responded to? In life cycle planning, which strategies will extend the product’s overall performance and value to the market the most?

PK. In the case of a product launch or a brand renovation, the most important factors to understand are: customer needs (functional/emotional), key decision drivers, and an understanding of how your benefits align to these needs and drivers versus competition.

A comprehensive needs map – for the physician and the patient – helps to ensure that your product and brand are operating within the landscape of relevant customer needs. If done properly, it will get past the obvious and include those needs which are latent, or unarticulated. Equally important is determining which of these needs, and their corresponding benefits, disproportionately drive customers in the product and brand choices that they make.

Finally, you’ll need to intersect this learning – with where your product and brand have permission to go. This ‘permission’ can be based in existing perceptual strengths, product advantages and/or by positioning your brand around a highly relevant category benefit that competition has left unclaimed.

NGP. What services do you provide to ensure this target is reached?
PK. Our services focus on ensuring that a brand’s strategy is speaking to the right target in a way that is relevant and uniquely compelling versus competition. We work with clients to define who the right target is – and then to define a relevant and action-driving brand strategy against that target. We define success as getting to the strategy that can both persuade the target and drive the target to take the right action (physician and consumer).

Ultimately this action is about delivering meaningful business impact (not just ‘reaching’ the target, per se – but ‘impacting’ the target and, ultimately, the business). To this end, our consulting services include customized insights solutions (qualitative, quantitative) in service of strategic marketing and brand outcomes.

GA. It costs five times more to convert a new physician or win a new patient than to keep current ones. Eliciting and more effectively addressing complaints from patients can lead to double-digit improvements in patient satisfaction scores and reductions in risk costs.

TARP is the world’s leading physician and patient experience agency and research consultancy. For more than 35 years, we have worked with many of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, such as GSK, Merck, Roche, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer and Eli Lilly, pioneering the science of quantifying, managing and optimizing the physician and patient experience.

NGP. How does market research for the pharmaceutical industry differ to that of other industries?
GA. At one time, market research for the pharmaceutical industry differed greatly in the following ways: (1) it needed to be measured and reported in real-time, or as close to real-time as possible; (2) it needed to be hyper-granular, because of pharma’s ability to affect the smallest of segments; and (3) until recently, with new technologies and changing markets, pharma’s research often came from liaison segments, and not the ultimate end-users of their products.

Today, most industries demand real-time measurement and reporting. The pharma industry is operating more lean and is not as capable of affecting the smallest of segments. The industry has reduced the size of field sales personnel, which may mean that hyper-granular data is less useful. Finally, technology is becoming the great equalizer and has globalized patient opinion, perception and experience.

PK. I’ll speak to two market research factors that are unique to the pharmaceutical industry. The first factor is that we are often trying to understand and influence physician behavior. We don’t subscribe to the idea that you can’t get deeply inside a physicians’ heads to understand more latent needs. We’ve found physicians remarkably open to trying more creative research techniques, if you effectively and credibly engage them.

The second factor is that it’s not uncommon for a pharmaceutical brand to be managed in two pieces (physician and consumer) rather than holistically. While this may not seem like a research issue at the face of it, we have found that this can lead to a bifurcated insights program that misses the important connective tissue between what the doctor thinks and does in relation to the brand, and the ultimate impact on the patient (in both strategy development and brand equity tracking)

NGP. What innovations will be making an impact on pharmaceutical market research in the next 12-18 months?
GA. Social media will continue to have a dramatic impact on the pharma industry, because it is further behind than others in developing significant and reciprocal relationships with its end-users, and because it is one of the most highly regulated in the world today. A good number of pharma companies have entered into the world of social media, although most tepidly and over-cautiously due to the regulatory governance which controls and dictates how they interact with consumers.

Pharma does needs to embrace social media, and present itself transparently and genuinely to the power of these networks, in order to foster a real and reciprocal exchange of information. However, if pharma attempts to manipulate, control, disseminate marketing messages, or execute traditional marketing tactics within this new technology realm, consumers will globally expose their disingenuous efforts to all.

PK. In terms of market research innovations and trends, we believe there will continue to be a migration to the web for qualitative. While we generally do not use the web for traditional focus group research (due to the trade-off involving non-verbal communication), we routinely use an online qualitative chat method imbedded in quantitative research.

This helps us to understand the ‘whys’ behind some of the key quantitative metrics, in real-time and in a targeted fashion (the chats are targeted at respondents who answer a certain way). We find it leads to more robust and actionable implications on the back-end, because we don’t just understand the static metrics, but also the more dynamic rationale for how the consumer, or physician, arrives at those metrics.

Geoff Arbuckle is Vice President, Healthcare and Business Development at TARP. He is an accomplished healthcare professional with 17 years of experience, and a marketing, sales, and business development leader with outstanding record of maximizing revenues. He has held senior management positions with a recognized global consulting firm and one of the world’s largest healthcare conglomerates.

Patty Klingbiel is the President of Connell + Associates, a customer insights and brand strategy consulting firm. Patty has more than 17 years of brand marketing, general management and consulting experience with particular industry expertise in healthcare. She has held senior leadership roles at Procter & Gamble (OTC Healthcare), Merck-Medco (now Medco), Medsite (now WebMd), and the Zyman Group.