Narrow Your Competitive Set At Your Own Peril

To my knowledge, no Client or Academic Institution offers a training program for Product Directors to learn how to effectively and objectively evaluate creative concepts. Yet everyday, Clients and their agencies wrestle over the appraisal of creative executions and promotional ideas. The stakes only escalate for consumer creative when the perceived risks become higher, particularly when a multi-million dollar media budget is a consideration. The ‘subjectivity swirl’ as I call it results in wasted time, money, and effort.

For Clients, let me propose a few mandatories to consider:

1. Is the concept distinct and ownable given the competitive set and noise level?
2. Does the concept align with target market insights garnered prior to concept development?
3. Does the concept ‘speak’ to the target? Caveat: This of course requires you to know who the target is.
4. Is the concept expandable to a multi-channel execution or does the power of the concept rest in the execution itself?
5. Is the concept sustainable? Can it work as you expand indications?
6. Does the concept lead to the desired action and articulation? In other words, is it likely to make your target audience do and say what you want about your brand?

At a minimum, I’ve encouraged Clients to press their Agencies to provide a draft set of criteria that the Client can comment upon. Developing evaluation criteria that both Agency and Client have input on is a step in the right direction!

If your pharmaceutical brand has been on the market for a couple of years and is under-performing, the notion of re-positioning might seem tempting as a means to reinvigorate sales. But the truth is, without compelling new data or an additional indication, it is extremely difficult (read…near impossible) to successfully re-position your brand in a meaningful way to your customers.

Brand perceptions are formed relatively quickly and become ingrained with product experience and influenced by your previous marketing and sales efforts.

Instead of thinking about re-positioning, think about re-focusing your brand story. Often times, brand messaging starts out diffuse at launch and then becomes further diluted over time as attempts to keep the sales story “fresh” actually result in a fragmented approach to communication.

What if you got your entire team together today, sat them in a room, and asked each of them to write down the key take-home message for your brand. How confident are you they would all write down the same thing?
The key to re-invigorating your brand story lies in taking an objective look at the potential points of communication focus that exist. Now, the most important word in this sentence is “objective.” Our experience has been that you can’t do this internally and your agency likely lacks the objectivity as well.

You can try getting a new agency, but that often fails too. How do you find the right agency when you can’t even communicate the core point for your brand in the RFP with any degree of confidence?

We do a lot of Communication Platform work at ROF and most of it is for on-market brands in need of a tighter story. There is a disciplined process that must be applied here because message development is a strategic exercise…not a creative one. The creative comes later once the platform is optimized and the agency initiates concepts and executional tactics.

So, before you invest a significant amount of your budget and time in re-positioning your brand, try re-focusing your current brand story. Contact us if you’re a biopharma marketer, and we can share a recent success that got marketing and sales focused and brand share moving.

We spend an inordinate amount of time defining the competitive set in this industry, only to then ultimately narrow it down to our own peril.

What do I mean?

First, we start by focusing exclusively on prescription products while often ignoring medical procedures, OTC products, medical devices, imaging therapies, etc. Next, we further screen down the competitive set through overly strict adherence to the labeled indication, such mild-to-moderate, refractory, etc. There has to be some recognition here that physicians apply their training beyond just the limits of two well-controlled clinical trials.

Applying these two screens alone gets us down to maybe 3-4 competitors that feel comfortable to us as biopharma marketers because these competitors look like our own product. The problem is that it’s just not based in market reality!

Defining the competitive set is key to developing a compelling and persuasive communication platform. What are you positioning your product against in the mind of the doctor? This is the question that we should be asking to filter the potential competitors – rather than filtering on whether the potential competitor is an actual prescription or within the labeled indication.

What if your brand’s major competition is inertia, rather than a specific brand – how do you account for that? What if your greatest competition is access and reimbursement constraints—would that be covered in your typical thinking?

In order to ensure differentiation against the current competitive set in any given category, you have to start by getting the competitive set right. Don’t lose sight of what might be the most significant nemesis for your brand just because it doesn’t have a product name or a PI.