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When Your Differentiated Brand Positioning Inspires Your Customers But Not You

Have you ever been part of a brand team that decided not to move forward with a differentiated positioning that tested well with customers because the team or its management were not personally excited by it? We have. Over the past few years, we’ve noticed this trend among a select group of companies. They’ve engaged...
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Emotional Connection – Earned Not Given

Launch brands often overtly seek to dictate an emotional connection with physicians without fully understanding the time and requirements necessary to obtain it. Most commonly, brands start by developing a brand positioning that includes an emotional benefit based more on what the marketers desire for their brand vs. what the physicians and patients want or...
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 >

When Your Differentiated Brand Positioning Inspires Your Customers But Not You

Have you ever been part of a brand team that decided not to move forward with a differentiated positioning that tested well with customers because the team or its management were not personally excited by it? We have. Over the past few years, we’ve noticed this trend among a select group of companies. They’ve engaged...
read more >

Emotional Connection – Earned Not Given

Launch brands often overtly seek to dictate an emotional connection with physicians without fully understanding the time and requirements necessary to obtain it. Most commonly, brands start by developing a brand positioning that includes an emotional benefit based more on what the marketers desire for their brand vs. what the physicians and patients want or...
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 >

Health Meets Healthcare: Our Case for a 4 Day Work Week

The world seems to have 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 learned when life unexpectedly slowed down...
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Addressing the Key Question Your Prescribers Will Ask on Day One

We’ve had the opportunity to participate in or examine our fair share of pharma/ biotechnology brand launches over the years. What sets apart most successful product launches from sub-optimal product launches is the ability to address one central question your physicians will almost certainly ask at approval. What is the one patient type that will...
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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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Our evidence-based approach provides us with a unique lens to observe and provide insights and commentary on industry news and common client experiences. Please note that any similarities of the events and insights provided here to your current brand situation are purely intentional and should not be considered coincidental.