What We Think

The amazing thing about our industry is that every year we deliver new exciting products that have different mechanisms of action, biomarkers, tests, and endpoints that demonstrate the value our R&D provides. Unfortunately, most of the market research methodologies supporting the launch of these new products haven’t kept up with the spirit of innovation that our products are delivering.

Henry Ford is attributed with saying, “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have said ‘faster horses.’”

This encapsulates a lot of the market research I see being done recently, especially with truly innovative products. Phrases like ‘game changing’ and ‘paradigm shifting’ get thrown around, yet most market research methodologies continue to rely on doctors and/or patients telling the pharmaceutical or biotechnology company how to sell the product or craft the story. A host of messages (sometimes dozens) are put in front of the respondent and they are asked to construct a story for the brand.

The result is ‘a faster horse’ platform and pharmaceutical companies wonder why these messages aren’t ‘game changing’ or ‘paradigm shifting’ once executed in the marketplace. If your new brand is truly innovative, it’s counterintuitive to rely on your target audience to take you to a place that they themselves have never been.

You’re the marketer! Don’t punt the responsibility for crafting the optimal story for your brand to your market researcher and certainly not to your target audience.

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 brand positioning and subsequent go-to-market strategies necessary to maximize their molecule. More often, considerations for the on-market brands, which are delivering today’s revenue, serve to limit the market opportunity for tomorrow’s product. This is a real-world example of what the late Harvard Business School professor, Clayton Christensen, called ‘the innovator’s dilemma.’

Read On

After five years of intensive focus on pharmaceutical brand positioning, I stepped away from the discipline in 2006 to start Return on Focus. With the clarity of a five-year sabbatical and a renewed focus on increasing the level of evidence behind communication platform development (positioning + message hierarchy), I’ve found the primary culprit to poor positioning . . .
the conjunction!

If you can’t immediately recall the School House Rock Song, Conjunction Junction, conjunctions are connector words like AND and OR, and they’re used for “hookin’ up words and phrases and clauses,” thus allowing the ability to combine two or more thoughts or ideas in a sentence. So you see the problem with conjunctions and positioning, right?

If positioning is supposed to be a single-minded concept or perceptual unit, it shouldn’t have any conjunctions at all! Exhibit A is the oft used positioning statement catch-all – Product X is the best balance of efficacy, safety, AND tolerability.

My definition of positioning after being away from the space for a little while remains the same – Positioning is the art of sacrifice. Pull out your positioning statement, count the number of conjunctions, and then give me a call for a strong dose of sacrificial thinking!