How to Ensure a Successful Drug Launch
how to ensure a successful drug launch, from addressing challenges to refining marketing and planning.
Drug launches traditionally spearheaded growth in the pharma industry. These meticulously planned and carefully executed events faced an array of inherent challenges before, from logistics to marketing and more. Today, COVID-19 has only exacerbated these challenges, adding significant strain on companies and stacking the odds against them.
As such, 2022 may only require more careful deliberation, more thorough planning, and more expansive, customer-first pharma marketing. In this context, success may never be guaranteed, but there exist certain optimal steps to take towards it. Let us highlight them in this article, as we explore how to ensure a successful drug launch.
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The immense challenges of a drug launch
While COVID-19 has undoubtedly brought forth new challenges, it did not spoil an otherwise thriving landscape. On the contrary, drug launches have always faced inherent challenges due to increased competition, disjointed marketing, and other oversights and intrinsic hardships.
McKinsey's research illustrates this well, as it found the following:
Two-thirds (66%) of new drugs failed to meet pre-launch sales expectations.
The majority of them (78%) continued to lag behind forecasts in year one.
Of those, 70% continued to lag behind in year two.
A few years later, Deloitte's research identified a notable difference. It does confirm that new drugs "continue with the revenue trajectory set at launch", whether they miss or meet expectations. However, it finds that 36% of all drugs failed to meet market expectations – a far more promising figure. Still, it also finds that "drugs launched by large companies underperform compared to their counterparts", a concerning trend. It also identifies an increased role in the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) as regards sales efficiency, with priority reviews and orphan drug designation as two notable factors. Finally, it notes that "the average revenue per drug has declined significantly", further painting a bleak picture.
In all cases, such research tends to identify the same challenges to drug launches. Namely, poor market research and lacking buyer personas, disorganized teams, and increasingly stiff competition.
Ensuring a successful drug launch
Fortunately, these shortcomings and challenges may help us compartmentalize and highlight what successful drug launches will need to account for. In order, we may divide them into marketing, internal organization, and competition and post-launch efforts.
1. Marketing
Initially, any product launch hinges on impeccable marketing, and drug launches are no exception. At a cursory glance, notable healthcare marketing mistakes to avoid include:
A lack of a cohesive overall strategy and SMART predefined goals
Accurate audience identification
Underperforming websites
Overlooking customer distrust
Lacking social proof
Undervaluing inbound marketing in favour of outbound tactics
A lack of post-launch monitoring.
Here, marketers may begin by establishing a solid course of action pre-launch through such means as:
Marketing diversification. Pre-launch and post-launch marketing alike must account for erratic customer journeys, general customer distrust, and other such challenges. As such, an omnichannel marketing strategy may be advisable. Affiliate marketing is one of the options marketing teams may consider, as many who have worked with affiliated businesses know its value.
Product differentiation. Similarly, drug differentiation will often, but not always, play a pivotal role in a successful drug launch. McKinsey's aforecited research agrees, finding that roughly "one in four" new drug launches involve strongly differentiated products, but "more than half" are "moderately differentiated". Should this not be possible, marketers will need to reroute their efforts toward establishing unmet needs within their target populations.
Disciplined execution. Finally, Deloitte’s research also rightly pinpoints the need for “end-to-end strategic planning”. Pre-launch, a strict alignment of various teams’ operations should ensure a robust foundation, removing friction throughout. Post-launch, the trend of missed sales expectations continuing should not discourage marketers from adhering to their initial plan with vigour.
2. Teams and organization
For that matter, ensuring a successful drug launch certainly hinges on far more than excellent marketing alone. Exploring this subject, PharmExec’s Divya Yerraguntla begins by rightly identifying “a cross-functional team” as an absolute imperative. It is critical, she argues, “that all of the key stakeholders are at the table for the entire life cycle of the product[and] that everyone on the team is aligned on the strategy and path to launch.”
Drug launches are indeed expansive and complicated processes, because they involve, among others, such teams as:
Marketing teams
Regulatory teams
Legal teams and compliance teams
Clinical R&D teams
Supply and manufacturing teams.
It is thus imperative that all teams involved coordinate and operate in lockstep, ensuring that the pre-launch phase sees optimal use of funding and resources. Eularis’ Dr Andree Bates strongly agrees, also identifying “cross-functional collaboration” as an instrumental asset. Through it, he argues, “R&D can learn the concerns and needs of marketers, and incorporate new research points that can be instrumental in later positioning and sales”.
Of course, marketing to healthcare professionals will require due diligence, so this is a crucial pre-launch endeavour. Pharma companies may begin by breaking down data silos, using such assets as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software where applicable. In turn, team leaders must ensure goal transparency, task delegation, recurring reviews, and consistently open channels of communication.
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3. The competition and the day after
Finally, ensuring a successful drug launch requires a firm grasp of the competition, as well as a robust post-launch plan. Smith & Jones highlight this need in the post-COVID era, and pharma digital marketing trends reflect it in the video below.
In this regard, competition may be defined more specifically through product differentiation combined with perceived disease burden. Indeed, strongly differentiated drugs may still target a largely unestablished disease area, while undifferentiated products may still perform adequately if they treat diseases with a high perceived burden. As such, competitor analysis will need to hinge on both those factors and their combined effect. Marketers should identify the drug’s market position early, and focus their efforts on addressing the factor that will grant them a competitive edge.
Similarly, post-launch activities must swiftly account for all emerging data and adjust accordingly. The Boston Consulting Group stresses this need, asserting that “investment strategies need to be dynamic and adapt to the realities of the marketplace. When it is apparent plan A is not working, companies need to shift gears and quickly pursue previously mapped out alternate routes”. It is here where diligent planning can indeed pay off, as the above research still finds that newly launched drugs can indeed escape their initial trajectory through course correction and strategy refinements.
Ensuring a successful drug launch
To summarize, ensuring a successful drug launch requires strenuous effort and due diligence. It requires excellent, diversified marketing that accurately pinpoints audiences, differentiates the drug from its peers, and establishes its need. It requires robust cross-functional collaboration among all the teams and parties involved. It hinges on deep market research to accurately identify the drug’s market position, direct competition, and needs.
Finally, it relies on meticulous pre-launch planning no less than on solid post-launch plan Bs and Cs, which will enable swift course correction as needed to meet sales expectations. It is no easy feat, by any means, so only the prepared may emerge victorious in this increasingly competitive landscape.
Guest contributor: Lisa Roberts.
For more on strategic marketing approaches in the pharmaceutical sectors, and how we can help you, visit our section on strategy.