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 easily end the reign of a trusted brand leader.

A disruptor approach can be effective, but it’s important to realize that you and your competitor’s pivotal data is only the first input to physicians’ ultimate perceptions and positioning of your respective brands. In the real world, physicians will consider your clinical data and promotional claims, but they will also augment that information with their and their patients’ personal experience with your brands. While your brand may have what appears to be an impressive numerical improvement or a unique, more stringent endpoint vs. the trusted brand leader, you must consider that their status is also on based on the outcomes of hundreds, maybe thousands of prescribing events.

Given this dynamic, the launch distruptor strategy is often met with apathy from physicians, because they give the benefit of the doubt to the trusted leader brand. They let their own significant positive personal experience fill in any data gaps identified by the challenger brand, which ultimately negates the team’s efforts to establish clincial differentiation. We also frequently see challenger brands accelerate the failure of this approach by trying to force a strong emotional connection that rivals the leader brand’s from the outset.

So, how do you overcome this phenomenon?

1. Assume nothing when it comes to the uniqueness of your data and conduct market research to understand whether physicians believe that only your brand (and not their trusted brand) can claim ownership of a new data point or that your data represents a clinically meaningful improvement over their current standard
2. Utilize your brand positioning development process to identify the key functional benefit(s) that you can consistently promise and deliver upon while simultaneously exploring the emotive spaces this can lead to over time
3. Create a plan to track real world experiences with your brand to gauge alignment between the experience necessary to support your desired positioning and what physicians are actually experiencing with their patients in the real world
4. Lastly, Brand Teams (and the entire organization) need to get comfortable making target physicians uncomfortable with the status quo. As a disruptor trying to drive a specific change in long-standing behavior, you need to challenge the physician on what he or she is doing every day.

This challenger mindset starts with your internal team dynamics and should manifest in all your brand engagements. If you can’t get comfortable challenging the way your company or team has always done things, then it is unlikely you will find comfort challenging the physician beliefs and behaviors necessary to become a true challenger brand. If you attempt to become a challenger brand in name only, you should get comfortable with a slow launch trajectory.