Santos Torres, Jr., Director of Marketing, Bausch + Lomb
Typically, when a pharmaceutical product nears loss of exclusivity (LOE), budgets for those products are often decreased along with sales force support and generic options begin to adversely affect sales.
Finding himself in this situation, Santos Torres, Jr. was determined to keep two mature pharmaceutical brands top of mind to the prescriber. Instead of using nontraditional methods of marketing, Santos used a strictly data-driven approach to create impact for these brands based on the story of Oakland Athletics’ General Manager, Billy Beane, in the movie, Moneyball.
As the first step, Santos conducted in-depth primary research to uncover the specific beliefs and attitudes that drive ophthalmologists, optometrists, allergists, and pediatric ophthalmologists’ behaviors. He also conducted secondary research with groups such as Kantar Media. Once the information was combined and analyzed, Santos uncovered the key insight necessary to prepare a customer-centric marketing and sales plan—that these high-potential physicians didn’t recognize the benefits these mature brands offered over generics.
To deliver on this insight, Santos developed an insight-driven promotional campaign to specifically target practitioners. Through the use of email campaigns, regional speaker programs, detail aids, and two new websites, the copy focused on the symptoms versus indication, and highlighted the benefits to the patient. Traffic to the digital ecosystem was also bolstered to target segmented physicians with programmatic media buys, paid search, and search engine optimizations. The campaign allowed each brand to maximize their set KPIs—and in many cases, exceed them.
While generic competition for pharmaceutical eye drops will continue to grow, Santos’ customer-centric approach has made a difference by encouraging physicians to continue to write branded Bausch + Lomb products. His mature Bausch + Lomb brands have also been able to maintain their market share in a highly competitive environment.
