Solution oriented. Focus guaranteed.

Return on Focus (ROF) is strategic marketing consultancy focused on telling compelling brand stories that ultimately get the right medicines to the right patients.

ROF has developed a unique approach that allows us to uncover each brand’s strategic value within its specific market. We then focus on helping marketers define the positioning, core messages, and strategic steps necessary to own that value in the minds of their customers by employing the principles of evidence-based marketing.

ROF works with various pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, including Fortune 500 manufacturers and small biotechs preparing to launch their first new molecular entity. Over the past 5 years, we’ve worked with more than 40 companies, including 7 of the top 10 and 14 of the top 50.

Regardless of your size or strategic challenge, when you work with ROF, we guarantee we’ll help create the positive tension necessary to ask and answer the most important strategic questions for your brand.

  • Brand Communications
  • Industry Observations
  • 4 Day Work Week

Is your next generation product being positioned using a last generation process?

While the premise/promise/proof (PPP) approach to brand positioning development is well known and still commonly used, it does not allow brands to garner the full benefits of a true storytelling approach. Whether its use is related more to tradition, habit, and inertia or to a lack of confidence in a team’s ability to craft a...
read more >

Fact or fiction? – You can’t position your brand based on MOA

When we’re conducting positioning work with Clients, we often hear a blanket statement that a pharmaceutical/ biotechnology brand cannot be successfully positioned based on its mechanism of action (MOA). It’s likely that repeated comments from physicians to the effect of, “I don’t care how your drug works. I only care that it works.”, have made...
read more >

Portfolio Approach Creates Conundrum at Brand Level

As pharmaceutical manufacturers increasingly focus their corporate commitment within a limited number of therapeutic areas and disease states, their marketers face greater complexity and new commercial challenges that may ultimately limit their success. The marketers entrusted with launching the next treatment within a therapeutic franchise are frequently not given the latitude needed to develop the...
read more >

Essential to Launch the Brand, Not the Vision

Most products being launched in Oncology and Immunology these days are “pipeline in a product” assets. In fact, the average number of indications for each new product in development has increased steadily since 2014. This shift has led to a dramatic impact on positioning development, with Brand Teams often more focused on developing “positioning” that...
read more >

Is your next generation product being positioned using a last generation process?

While the premise/promise/proof (PPP) approach to brand positioning development is well known and still commonly used, it does not allow brands to garner the full benefits of a true storytelling approach. Whether its use is related more to tradition, habit, and inertia or to a lack of confidence in a team’s ability to craft a...
read more >

Fact or fiction? – You can’t position your brand based on MOA

When we’re conducting positioning work with Clients, we often hear a blanket statement that a pharmaceutical/ biotechnology brand cannot be successfully positioned based on its mechanism of action (MOA). It’s likely that repeated comments from physicians to the effect of, “I don’t care how your drug works. I only care that it works.”, have made...
read more >

Portfolio Approach Creates Conundrum at Brand Level

As pharmaceutical manufacturers increasingly focus their corporate commitment within a limited number of therapeutic areas and disease states, their marketers face greater complexity and new commercial challenges that may ultimately limit their success. The marketers entrusted with launching the next treatment within a therapeutic franchise are frequently not given the latitude needed to develop the...
read more >

Essential to Launch the Brand, Not the Vision

Most products being launched in Oncology and Immunology these days are “pipeline in a product” assets. In fact, the average number of indications for each new product in development has increased steadily since 2014. This shift has led to a dramatic impact on positioning development, with Brand Teams often more focused on developing “positioning” that...
read more >

The Potential Pitfalls of Overrelying on Expert Advice

Today’s commercial lead launching the next big advance in a specific category too often circulates exclusively in rarified air. To put it a different way, their views about the market, prescribers, patients, and their product are almost exclusively shaped by a small group of key medical experts who tend to specialize exclusively in the condition...
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Physician Experience Fills Data Gaps for Trusted Brands

Brand Teams have recently become intoxicated with idea of positioning themselves as a ‘challenger brand,’ with the expressed goal of becoming the disruptor in an established category. This approach is frequently built on the logic that the presence of a unique endpoint or a numerical improvement in an established endpoint from the pivotal trial(s) can...
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Five Cultural Factors That Can Limit Your Ability to Differentiate Your Brand

For those that aren’t familiar with brand positioning, it is the act of creating a perception of your  product in the mind of your target audience that differentiates it from its competition. Regardless of the positioning development and validation process you employ, it’s critical for marketers to understand the culture of their respective company to...
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First Few Prescribing Experiences Determine Physician Perceptions

The importance of proper patient identification at launch cannot be overstated. The feedback from the initial patients prescribed your product is one of the most important factors in determining how physicians perceive its utility vs. the competition.  Multiply this by all your target physicians, and these initial experiences have a huge impact on your initial...
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Health Meets Healthcare: Our Case for a 4 Day Work Week

As the Summer of 2023 enters full swing, the world has officially shaken off the remaining vestiges of the pandemic years.  While we are all enjoying this return to normalcy, it’s critical that those of us who have the privilege and responsibility to craft policies for the workforce don’t forget some of the lessons we...
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