Monica Nieves
Business Planning Leader
AstraZeneca
An Unforgettable Name
One of the best ways to sell a product is to actually have a name that consumers will remember. Of course, in pharma, many people struggle to pronounce drug names—let alone remember them. Monica Nieves helped to make Lynparza unforgettable in patients’ minds, and that is only one of the reasons why you are not going to want to forget her name.
Monica was brought on as the Consumer Marketing Manager for Lynparza. While the brand had someone working on direct-to-consumer tactics among other things, the company wanted someone solely dedicated to the task. Monica immersed herself into learning about ovarian cancer and Lynparza for an eight-month period. Armed with that knowledge and new patient insights, they launched a campaign focused on how Lynparza targerts cancer using DNA damage response. But the campaign also put a focus on the letter “L.” The campaign featured a woman sitting in the shape of an L and used words and phrases that start with “L” that would resonate with patients such as “laugh,” “learn,” and “live in the moment.”
“In a short amount of time we had a high amount of aided awareness in terms of patient’s recognizing Lynparza,” Monica explains. “It was about a 50% range of patients with aided awareness of the brand, and a significant amount of those patients are actually asking for it.”
AstraZeneca recently recognized Monica’s success by promoting her into the new role of Business Planning Leader, in which she will be responsible for maximizing the operational effectiveness of the field and marketing functions as well as other cross-functional teams across the entire women’s cancer franchise. However, AstraZeneca has also recognized Monica for more than just her business success.
She was given the company’s “Power of US Award” for her role in creating 5Ks to raise money for Puerto Rico after it was hit by Hurricane Maria. The funds from the 5Ks were donated to Friends of Puerto Rico in order to help the organization get medical supplies over to the island and later helped to fly patients that were on dialysis back so that they could get treatment.
