Marketing magic at Shire

NGP. How do you enhance and leverage customer insights to fuel innovation?
CS. The first thing is trying to achieve an integrated look at the customer. The sales force is talking to customers, KOLs are talking to customers and R&D is talking with them and then there’s market research. So we try to integrate all of those insights into one whole, because these are all valuable and viable perspectives.

You can’t just rely on what the sales force says and you can’t just rely on what your opinion leaders say; what marketing research brings is understanding our representative customers and how they are the same or different from KOLs and sales reps targets.

NGP. Can you gauge whether something that’s very innovative is going to be successful, or if you’re pushing the envelope?

CS. It depends upon how much time and energy you need to spend selling it internally. We’ve done a fair amount of that in the last couple of years: teaching people about segmentation – why you would do it and how you use it – the use of targeting tools, emotional branding research, projective techniques, market structure studies, etc.

NGP. Do you have any specific insights or strategies for integrating market research – looking at qualitative versus quantitative findings?

CS. Qualitative should usually be the first step in any research program because you want to understand the range of behaviors, habits, practices, the decision process – all the why’s and how’s – and that should also help frame the issues for quantitative research. You should frame the parameters, the range of responses and then do quantitative research to really understand “how much” and “how often”.

Quantitative research should be the basis for making financial decisions but the quantitative research is only as good as the qualitative inputs, so you may have to go back and refine some of those inputs via qualitative research again.

Secondary research shows market trends, what’s going on, how much, how often, what’s the profile of the prescribers – but you don’t understand the why, which is what you have to get from primary research.

NGP. What tools and techniques do you use to successfully apply competitive intelligence to grow brand dominance?

CS. We do a lot of work at congresses – attending the symposia, listening to the poster presentations, talking with the opinion leaders and so on. There’s an enormous amount of public information in this industry. It’s been said that competitive intelligence is like a jigsaw puzzle; you don’t need all the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle to know what the picture is, you just need the right pieces. Identifying the key intelligence topics – the key things that we really need to know about this competitive brand or therapeutic area or manufacturing process – helps hone in on what we need to know to make better decisions.

NGP. How do you identify and evaluate indicators of competitor and market behavior that are meaningful?

CS. That’s one of the key questions because you can monitor everything but the question is: “What exactly is going to have an impact on the brand”?

We try to define the key things that are going to make a difference – and those we can do something about. Key factors to monitor are launch timing of our competitors, approval of new indications, generic entry, publication of clinical trial results at major meetings, especially in certain areas like oncology or cardiology. If you miss that meeting, that can have an impact on the uptake of your brand.

Monitoring metrics like the dosage is critical – particularly in Europe if reimbursement is based on average daily dosage and you want to ensure that the optimal therapeutic dosage is being used. Usage in severe vs. mild disease states can be critical.

The important thing is to figure out what are truly the key metrics to measure; we’re always measuring the basics like new prescriptions, refills and percent of new patient starts, and compliance, but there are usually specific measures critical to each brand.

Read the full interview online at www.ngpharma.com

Charlotte Sibley is Senior Vice President of Global Business Research and Intelligence for Shire Pharmaceuticals, with responsibility for market research, competitive intelligence, commercial assessment for new products and strategic forecasting. She joined Shire in January 2005 from Millennium Pharmaceuticals, where she was Vice President, Global Commercial Research and Health Outcomes. Previously, she was at Pharmacia Corporation (now Pfizer) as Vice President, Global Business Research.

Charlotte Sibley: “A lot of companies use war games before launch … and those can be very valuable”