Lifecycle Management

Today’s pharmaceutical environment allows little room for error. In a world of stringent regulations, aggressive competition, and reduced periods of exclusivity, marketers can’t afford the months or, even worse, years of recovery time that result from missing the mark on any aspect of commercialization. Over the next few months, experts from Campbell Alliance will examine the common mistakes brand managers make that can derail a product's commercial success and outline ways to avoid them.

Train Wrecks: Avoiding Common Mistakes That Derail a Product’s Commercial Success Please Plan a Competitive Game
By Tom Luginbill
The following story is true; however, key details have been changed to protect anonymity.

Background
Jill Philips was a Senior Product Manager at Midsize Pharma Inc., where she worked on Product X with a talented team of experienced marketers. Jill had a great deal of marketing experience, having spent nearly 18 months focusing exclusively on Product X—a marketed therapeutic oncology product. The product was a part of the company’s larger portfolio comprised of both development assets and marketed brands in oncology.

Product X was indicated for combination use in patients with late stage solid tumors and enjoyed good success in the market, generating $500 million in annual sales nearly four years post launch. Product X competed closely in the market with Product Y, which had a similar indication. While Product X maintained reasonably good differentiation from its other competitors, it was often poorly differentiated from Product Y by prescribers and payers.

After four years, Products X and Y had reached a stable and profitable equilibrium in the market. Their respective patient shares and dollar shares had leveled off, and senior management was pleased with Product X’s performance.

Situation
The brand team for Product X was preparing for the launch of a new competitor, Product Z, within the next two to three months. Product Z would have an indication very similar to Product X and Y. The company producing Product Z, Company Zed, was new to the oncology market and had not spent a great deal on pre-approval communications, so there was much that Jill and her team didn’t know about this new competitor.

As a result, the Director of Marketing for Product X instructed Jill to conduct a “competitive game” exercise that would help the team prepare for the launch of Product Z. The Director of Marketing wanted the game to focus on “strategic moves and countermoves” over a one-year horizon.

Action
In preparation for the game, Jill crafted a half-day agenda to provide an overview of the activity for participants. The agenda organized internal company participants into teams that would anticipate the most likely marketing strategies for Products X, Y, and Z. Given that the extended brand team was already familiar with the companies producing X and Y, Jill prepared pre-reading to focus on the new competitor: Product Z. The reading consisted of information on Company Zed’s background, current pipeline, published data, sales force deployment, historical pricing tendencies, and financial analyst viewpoints. Recognizing that the subject matter could be a bit dull, Jill hoped to instill a little fun into the exercise by preparing colored hats to designate the different teams on the day of the game.

Jill invited 30 individuals from across functional areas, including Clinical, Medical, Marketing, Managed Markets, Sales, and Market Research, to her competitive game exercise. In addition, the Director of Marketing invited their Vice President of Marketing. Most participants accepted the invitation, which contained a high-level agenda but few specific details.

Result
On the day of the game, Jill was prepared with an opening presentation that included high-level instructions on how teams would proceed and topics they should discuss. She encountered problems almost immediately, however, when a member of the sales teams requested that they also consider discussing likely selling messages and counter-messages. Before Jill could explain that this wasn't the focus of the game, several participants, including the Vice President of Marketing, quickly agreed to the proposition. Jill was stuck, and the focus of the game changed before it even began.

As Jill began to rotate among the breakout groups, it was immediately clear that participants were ignoring her agenda and work templates. She noticed that her marketing colleagues were doing most of the talking as they briefed their non-marketing counterparts on the current market situation, including details that participants should have picked up from the pre-reading. She knew immediately that participants hadn’t come prepared.

By mid-meeting, Jill noticed that several participants were distracted from the exercise and were in the hallway talking on their phone or answering e-mail. Only a few die-hard participants remained in their breakout rooms preparing something to share with the group. When the time came for teams to “report back” to the larger group, the presentations were very different. One presentation focused on sales deployment and messaging, while another presentation focused on the sequence in which different product line extensions might be rolled out to the marketplace. Another presentation focused on the pricing and contracting strategy in light of what the group thought would be the product’s value proposition.

All teams produced good, although limited, results. The diverse nature of the presentations made it nearly impossible, however, to compare results across products or to draw conclusions. Participants seemed engaged in the discussion, but it was often rambling and unfocused. By the time the presentations were over, Jill realized that there weren’t actionable recommendations at hand. While there were some good insights into the competition, Jill had no specific recommendations on how to use these insights moving forward.

Lessons Learned
This story is not an isolated incident. In fact, Jill’s experience is illustrative of many gaming exercises. Most brands have a “competitive game” on their brand planning or launch calendars. While these exercises have become a standard practice for brand teams, very few people claim to have ever been to a “great” competitive game where actionable recommendations were identified and agreed upon. If brand teams are committed to leveraging key takeaways from this story, they can limit future mistakes on the planning and execution of these exercises to better enhance their chance at success.

1) Establish Objectives First, Methodology Second
First and foremost, Jill’s game lacked clear objectives and quickly got out of control. Objectives for a competitive game need to be explicit and clearly communicated to participants in advance of the exercise. In fact, objectives should be discussed with key participants in advance of the game to gain their support. Additionally, objectives need to dictate the game methodology. For example, competitive messages can be tested through detail simulation, strategy tested through scenario modeling, and competitor knowledge measured through shadow brand planning. Jill jumped straight into planning an agenda based on her preconception of what a game should be, rather than thinking through her objectives and then selecting the right methodology.

2) Align Expectations Across Stakeholders
Jill’s pre-reading was lengthy, and few participants read it because of their busy schedules. Jill also failed to provide clarity around why the reading was necessary for the meeting. Setting expectations upfront will help the group stay focused.

3) Create a Realistic Game
The results of Jill’s game reflected the thoughts and expectations of their brand team in isolation. While that viewpoint is valid from a certain perspective, it can be insular. Teams, especially experienced teams, have a tendency to project their thoughts and feelings onto competitors, particularly new competitors. In this example, no competitive intelligence or information on the clinical endpoints for the new product was provided, so teams had very limited knowledge of the subject they were to address. Better information might have helped the team anticipate actual plans of their competitors, rather than imagined plans based on their own internal perspective.

4) Engage Your Customers
Participants in Jill’s game could have benefited from payer, prescriber, patient, and key opinion leader perspectives so that the results of the game didn’t solely reflect their own internal viewpoint. While there is a need for intuition and market experience, these exercises should be primarily fact—and data-driven. Soliciting the participation of external participants could have provided, at a minimum, some external facts.

5) Insist on Actionable Output
In advance of the exercise, Jill failed to determine exactly how the results would be used. Key questions to be answered include: What decisions would be made? What guidance would be given to their business partners? What contingency plans could be anticipated? What message would be refined? Making these decisions explicit at the outset would have helped better focus the teams.

Of course, in this example, the unfocused competitive game could not be blamed entirely on Jill. Marketers are often asked to prepare competitive games by their supervisors, who themselves have no clear vision for the objectives and desired outputs. Managers who ask their subordinates to execute those games are as much responsible for the result as those they lead. Instead, before a team starts planning a competitive game, they must invest the requisite time and effort to explicitly define the objectives and desired outputs. If this step is skipped, no colored shirts or hats can hide the disaster that is likely to follow.

Tom Luginbill is Vice President of Brand Management Practice at Campbell Alliance (www.CampbellAlliance.com). Based in Chicago, IL, he welcomes comments at 888-297-2001, x 7220.