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Weatherproofing Your Brand

How marketing science can help pharma brands use share of preference to see which way the wind is blowing

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Pharmaceutical brands in today's fiercely competitive market can no longer rely on past performance to predict the future. Accurately forecasting conditions for a product requires a view of the marketplace with a forward-looking eye on the trajectory of the brand. A key part of that is recognizing that brands are not set in stone and their performance continuously evolves and responds to market stimuli.

To help marketers better anticipate the market conditions their brands will face, an advance in pharma marketing science has revealed that the share of preference measurement can act as a sort of weathervane for sales, acting as a metric for how physicians prescribe medications. Alongside a brand's existing market share, share of preference can identify opportunity and risk for a brand, and, crucially, how to realize that opportunity or mitigate risk.

The engine driving share of preference for pharma manufacturers is the conversion model, a tool that has specifically been adapted for the pharma industry. Developed in 1986, the conversion model is based on the Zipf distribution, which can be used to capture the nonlinear ways in which people disproportionately value "winning" brands. The model identifies consumers' commitment to brands by tracking performance, assessing the competitive landscape, and illuminating customer behavior.

 

Improving Visibility

A pharmaceutical brand's positioning is very dependent on the area of therapy in which it's focused. For example, "innovation" and to some extent being "aggressive" are important characteristics for brands in the field of oncology (though that can vary according to the types of health care professionals being targeted), whereas in diabetes medicine, the focus would be on the familiarity of the brand. The nuances of assessing and improving a brand's emotional elements provide a very different approach to how to position a brand than having hard, scientific evidence of a product's mode of action or efficacy. These positioning elements can all be tied to a brand's ability to capture share of preference.

FIGURE 1

How Three Brands Used Share of Preference to React to Changing Market Conditions

The following charts show how three brands performed over seven tracking waves in terms of market share and share of preference. Kantar Health found that each of the brands reacted differently to changes in opportunity/risk.

Brand 1
For Brand 1, share of preference is greater than market share on T1, indicating an opportunity to increase market share. By T5, the brand’s preference begins to fall, and market share follows, indicating a need to rebuild equity.

Brand 2
For Brand 2, share of preference is lower than market share at T1 through T3, indicating a need to defend the brand’s market share. A sharp decline in market share at T4 aligns to the continued decline in share of preference for Brand 2, reinforcing the need to rebuild brand equity.

Brand 3
For Brand 3, a drop in market share and a steep drop in share of preference between T1 and T4 indicate an urgent need for the brand to correct course.

source: 2017 Kantar Health internal data

Share of preference can be a leading indicator of market share and allows brand teams to work much more effectively in reacting to changes in the marketplace. (See figure 1.)

 

Late Summer or Intermittent Rain?

Whatever the future conditions look like, this new application for share of preference will allow brands to use intelligent and validated predictions to grow or protect market share.

Brand equity is considered holistically across the three broad areas of brand access, brand experience, and brand execution. (See "Just What the Marketer Ordered," at left.) For the first time, a pharma-focused brand equity tool is validated in its ability to identify leading indicators of change — and the levers to drive that change.

The process of identifying brand opportunity begins by measuring a brand's market share before moving on to look at the brand equity for each product in the market. If a brand has a 20 percent market share, as an example, and has achieved an additional 5 percent in brand equity, the brand has a potential market share of 25 percent.

Brand equity shows the potential value a brand has built in the marketplace but has yet to convert on. To claim that value, the brand must grow its market share using appropriate and effective marketing activities. Although what's appropriate and effective marketing for a pharmaceutical brand is often unique to a product and its therapy area, there are some elements, such as the brand's side effects profile, which would be common areas for assessing how best to position the brand.

Once a brand's levers and barriers are identified, the next step is to look at a product's brand equity and market share and use all these elements to increase future market share. This is a step change from how this kind of research might have been carried out in the past, when pharma companies would have to take a backward look, starting with a product's current position and then trying to work out the reasons it attained that position. A far more powerful approach is to look into the future, acknowledging brand equity has been built within the market, determining how to realize it going forward, and to build future brand share from there.

 

Heat Balance

Pharma's traditional focus on the launch phase for new medicines, often to the exclusion of all subsequent phases of development, has to change. The high number of medicine launches that continue to fall short of expectations point to the need for a much nimbler approach across the whole lifecycle.

To facilitate this, it helps to break the lifecycle down into a brand journey that goes through four key stages: launch, immediate growth post-launch, peak performance, and managing decline.

At each of these stages, different drivers — whether they relate to market access, brand heritage, or translating brand strategy into action — will take precedence in maintaining brand growth or arresting brand attrition.

For pharmaceutical brands, this four-stage brand journey paradigm positions a launch as just the beginning of a process that sees different needs and levers come into play over time. Crucially, they allow the brand's trajectory to be changed at any time, ensuring that the launch phase does not represent the one and only time to a marketer has to get it right.

There are opportunities at every point in the lifecycle for change, removing the need to rigidly follow the traditional launch playbook's access-execution-and-experience approach. It can be replaced by an evidence-based manual that allows different types of brands more leeway to grow by following a holistic approach that allows for flexible analysis and strategic input throughout the lifecycle.

Mark Sales (@salesma1) is the head of global brand and customer experience, and Richard Goosey (@richard_goosey) is the chief methodologist, both at Kantar Health. You can email them at mark.sales@kantarhealth.com and richard.goosey@kantarhealth.com.


 

 

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