What We Think

Our industry is making significant progress in many therapeutic areas, especially with the promise of immuno-therapies and personalized medicine. However, even with these advances, prescribing inertia or as one client calls it ‘muscle memory prescribing’ continues to be a significant competitive threat to new product launches. I believe the reason for this inertia is “decision fatigue.”

Most marketers lack a sincere appreciation for the number of prescribing or prescribing-like decisions that the average physician has to make in a single day. The processes that Clients traditionally engage in to develop or examine positioning and marketing strategy often look at prescribing without this important context, even with the ubiquitous multiple page buying process in hand. Read On

The importance of proper patient identification at launch cannot be underestimated. I previously wrote about it being the key to a successful launch from the perspective of physician marketing and targeting. Yet, the biggest impact proper patient identification has on the physician is not from your marketing efforts at all, but from an invisible detail that most biotechnology companies don’t even measure – the feedback from the patients initially prescribed your product after launch.

What we see is that marketers obsess over the volume of scripts on a weekly or even daily basis, but virtually pay no attention to the attributes of those early patients until it’s too late.

The patient feedback comprised in this incredibly impactful invisible detail is based on two different types of evidence:
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Being able to clearly articulate to both physicians and patients ‘who is’ and ‘who is not’ the optimal candidate for your drug is probably the single most important task a Brand Team must execute in the days following FDA approval. In order to accomplish this, your marketing efforts to clearly identify and articulate the patient-types best suited for your drug must start early.

Unfortunately, inflated sales forecasts and launch expectations developed during the pre-launch phase often push Brand Teams to cast the net as wide as possible. The resistance to focus during pre-launch often leads to quotes from physician and patient launch research like the following: Read On