How to Avoid Cannibalization in a Product Portfolio and Supercharge Your Results

Many of our clients have a challenge. They have multiple brands with the same indication and more coming through in their pipeline. To maximize business results, it is critical that each of these products occupy their own clearly defined space within the indication and not cannibalize the biggest product in the portfolio. But how do you know which market space is the right one for each that will maximize sales, and how do you understand how the market dynamics are being changed by the new entrants?

 

Companies have never had so much information about their customers due to the data now being collected in big data initiatives, and yet many pharma are still not utilizing these effectively to solve the big issues such as how to maximize the product portfolio in one therapy area. Part of the problem is old thinking – doing things the way they always have been done and marketing on product attributes.

 

But this is seriously misguided for multiple reasons.

 

In this article I will focus on one area. Let’s consider a product that has a new mode of action and is faster acting. The product works better than anything else on the market for fast action. Marketing see this as a great marketing story and begin to market the drug around this attribute. And then the drug does not take off as expected. The company do not understand as it works faster than anything else.

 

Part of the issue is marketing the drug on attributes alone. ‘Prescribe my drug as it works faster.’ Marketing has been done like this for many decades. However, by doing this, the marketer is not taking into account the customer (physician and patient) and how they live and work. They have many jobs to be done in their life, some big (find a new career), some small (what will I wear today), some predictable (choose what to eat for lunch), some unpredictable (the airline lost my luggage and I have nothing to wear so need to find something quickly) and so on.

 

So when they consider a drug, they are essentially ‘using’ the drug to do a job for them. If it does the job well, they will ‘hire’ it again for that situation. If it does not do a good job for that situation, next time they face that circumstance they will look for something else. The word ‘Job’ really means what the individual wants to accomplish in a specific situation. This concept was developed by a Professor at Harvard University (not for drugs but products in general) and Eularis have taken this on board to apply to drug sales and marketing with great success.

 

We are now in a new era with new insights and analytics techniques available to us to really get into the minds of the target customers (physicians and customers and even payers) like never before.

 

We utilize a combination of collecting client existing data, adding market research data, and utilizing big data (claims data) to identify what these jobs to be done are for a physician and patient for a specific disease, condition or therapy area.  Once we understand the jobs to be done, we can identify and size the market opportunity spaces (often missed by other approaches) and then map all products (client portfolio and competitors) into these and see where the sweet spot for maximum result will be for each client product in a portfolio. When we do this for our client projects, it clarifies exactly how the products should be marketed as we can see the real drivers of prescribing for specific patient groups (and patients move from group to group as their disease progresses). This changes the way we both market and sell our drugs to one which really understands the end customers (physicians and patients) and their decision process in great detail, and resonates with them when they make drug decisions.

 

The market research data is important, but of course, we do not ask them what their job to be done is. The analysis teases that out from a specific methodology of asking questions and this is then combined with the other data and analytics. This kind of analysis supports the data you already have, such as existing market research, therapy area reports etc. These are all used when we work on these types of ‘jobs to be done’ projects. The combination of existing data, new data and big claims data, analysed with AI, reveals very powerful insights that other approaches fail to deliver.

 

What is fascinating with this approach is that the circumstances around a decision of which drug to ask for, or prescribe, are more important than the product attributes. It is the deep understanding of the range of circumstances facing a phsycian and their patient that shed light on how the drug should be marketed most effectively to capture maximum sales and how a portfolio of drugs can be co-positioned to ensure maximum success. Often a client comes to us with the question, ‘How can I maximize the uptake of a new drug in my portfolio, while continuing to maximize my existing blockbuster drug? How can I understand more fully the ‘what’ of how the market is structured now and the ‘why’ behind the structure with the dynamic changes occurring in the market place due to the new products entering the space?

 

For these projects, we leverage the existing internal data, collect new data and add in big data and analyse with Artificial Intelligence. This approach assesses the relationships between symptoms, tests, treatment changes and decisions while also linking it to an understanding of both the patients and physicians and their influencers and which brand choice they make when and why (both the conscious and subconscious why’s). Following this process enables us to more completely characterising the market structure as well as understanding the reasons and causes underlying this structure. As a consequence we can determine what is happening, why it is happening and where the opportunities lie and how large each opportunity space is.