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Blog
Could Emerging Biopharma Companies Have an Edge in Agile Brand Promotion?
Susan Kitlas, General Manager, Precommercial Business Unit, IQVIA
Christie Conn, VP, Brand & Commercial Strategy
Sep 07, 2022

The pandemic accelerated change in how biopharma companies are engaging with healthcare providers (HCPs) and other stakeholders. As digital engagement soared, so did comfort with virtual interactions. Many HCPs now welcome the chance to connect with biopharma companies on their own terms — through both personal (human) and non-personal (digital) channels. In fact, IQVIA research found that more than half of HCPs (52%) want to provide input on their promotion mix to tailor channels and messages.1

What does it take for biopharma companies to meet these and other expectations in the post-COVID-19, digitally savvy, and on-demand stakeholder environment?

It comes down to the need for adaptive thinking, agile execution, and evidence-based decisions. At IQVIA, we call this strategic imperative Agile Brand Promotion — the practice of intelligently connecting sales and marketing strategy and tactics to optimize brand performance.

Arguably, biopharmas of all sizes need to shift to this approach, but precommercial companies are especially well positioned to adopt it. Compared to established global corporations (the mega-ships of the healthcare market), emerging players are like jet boats. Smaller. Nimbler. Able to change direction more quickly and easily.

Unlike most large organizations, precommercial companies don’t have to break through longstanding organizational siloes. They don’t have to unlearn legacy ways of thinking or unravel and rebuild outdated processes.

In other words, they don’t have to turn a giant ship.

Instead, emerging biopharmas (EBPs) can steer toward Agile Brand Promotion from day one — embedding this approach into their organizational design, culture, and operations.

Designing for agility: Six core tenets

IQVIA has identified six core tenets of the Agile Brand Promotion framework. None of these represent “new” brand promotion strategies or tactics. What has changed is the urgency of weaving them together with greater adaptability and intelligence:

  1. Connected, convenient customer data. This is the foundational element for Agile Brand Promotion: linking data to create a 360-degree view of customers. That includes each HCP’s patient population, engagement preferences, practice affiliations, and referral networks. These insights are crucial to designing — and continually adapting — promotional strategies.
  2. Diverse, differentiated field roles. Sales reps are no longer the primary drivers of face-to-face customer interaction. Every EBP needs to consider building a cadre of field resources —including reps, medical science liaisons (MSLs), field reimbursement specialists, account managers, and nurse educators. How these resources are deployed will depend on each HCP’s therapeutic preferences and/or patient profiles — and may need to be tweaked over time.
  3. Omnichannel engagement. For some companies, the word “omnichannel” is synonymous with multichannel marketing; for others, “omnichannel” pertains to connections between HCPs and their patients. At IQVIA, omnichannel engagement covers all the channels a company uses to communicate externally with HCPs, patients, payers, and other audiences. Omnichannel engagement requires orchestration across sales, promotion, and marketing budgets — and interconnection across channels to deliver a seamless experience.
  4. Adaptive allocation. Local market and territory needs can be highly dynamic. Brand promotion should be, too — and this is where startups can really shine. Companies need the ability to identify emerging opportunities and challenges (think: a need for greater MSL presence in a specific health system or a geographic area where a lack of personal coverage calls for greater investment in digital). From there, companies need to be able to update resource allocation — dialing personal and non-personal channels up and down depending on market conditions.
  5. Hyper-personalized experience. As part of Agile Brand Promotion, precommercial companies work to shift from “pushing” promotions out to HCPs to “pulling” HCPs through with highly tailored experiences. These experiences offer each HCP the content they want, delivered via their preferred channels, at the cadence that fits their individual preferences.
  6. Advanced analytic decision-making. A growing mix of channels. Greater insights into providers’ patients and preferences. More diverse and dynamic field forces. Local market/territory dynamics. Tracking these variables takes more than a spreadsheet. It requires a sophisticated analytical approach — including use of machine learning tools to continually measure and optimize performance. This advanced analytic decision-making is at the heart of Agile Brand Promotion.

Each of these tenets is important on their own, but their true value comes from how a company integrates and orchestrates all six. If Agile Brand Promotion sounds too ambitious — or too expensive — for a startup, think again. This framework can be scaled to align with a precommercial company’s needs and budgets. At any size, Agile Brand Promotion is an investment in more effective launch planning and more actionable insights for navigating ever-changing waters.

 

1 Source: Brand Impact and IQVIA customer market research Q4 2021

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