Steps to help you deliver your brand objectives and desired knowledge and behavioural change

At this time of year, pharma marketing teams are often busy finalising their brand or portfolio plans for the next year, working closely with their cross-functional colleagues to align on the strategy and to design high level tactics. Then there’ll be lots of work on a senior management presentation followed by some careful patient modelling, forecasting and analysis to finalise the financials.

I’d like to set out a few questions to support a structured review of the quality and quantity of your brand, disease and customer insights which should help support your strategic choices and tactics and help you deliver your brand objectives and desired knowledge and behavioural change. An up-to-date insight map for your brand, disease/therapy area and for each prescriber/patient/payer segment can also be a critical tool for telling your brand story internally, briefing your agencies and creating content/messages/experiences that resonate.

So, let’s start with a few stimulus questions:

• Do you have a clear idea of what is new and has changed in the external environment during the course of this year? Thinking about changes in the funding and delivery of services, in the prioritisation of disease areas and patients, in the digital vs face-to-face delivery of service, in guidelines and protocols, in the political landscape, in patient support groups and of course in the use of new technologies for diagnosis, monitoring and much more.

• How up to date is your competitor intelligence? They will certainly be going through a period of analysis and planning too and might be planning some changes. Have you defined your key competitor assumptions? Do you have a good understanding of your competitors’ current and future strategy? And where, how and why prescribers and patients favour the competition vs your brand?
  
  
• Have you mapped your patient journey(s) in detailed steps showing the interactions, decisions, key stakeholders and activities, highlighting where the areas of need, success and tension exist?
  
  
• Have you identified your priority customer groups across different stakeholders: decision-makers, payers, patient types, prescribers, healthcare professionals? For each priority customer group, are you able to create a robust insight map showing the rational and emotional insights that are key to support your strategy and operations? There are lots of ways to create an insight map: a one-page mind map style, a persona-led map for each customer segment, a visual journey and/or a series of ‘critical conversations’ that lead to a treatment decision. Take your pick!
  
  
• The best questions are focused on triggers, change and decisions, and on understanding the ‘why’ rather than the ‘who’, ‘what’ or ‘when’. Which doctor profiles are initiating biologic therapies in their dermatology patients and why have they decided to do this now? Why are some patients considered more suitable for a biologic therapy? What is the trigger for a treatment review and switch for a patient? Why are some doctors worried about completing the additional paperwork needed for certain treatments?