What We Think

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!

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 interaction with 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 surveyed your entire team today and asked each of them to respond with the key take-home message for your brand. How confident are you they would all submit the same response? How confident are you they would be correct?

The key to re-invigorating your brand story lies in taking an objective look at the potential points of communication focus that exist currently. Now, the most important word in this sentence is “objective.” Our experience has been that brand teams and agencies are too close to the messages to do this without outside support.

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 should be 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.