Pharmaceutical Brand Strategy
Considerations for a successful pharmaceutical brand strategy.
When faced with product choices (which we will find in abundance in the pharmaceutical sectors), we often turn to what the marketers of those products would refer to as branding. Branding makes things easier for the people that buy our products and service because of familiarity.
A familiar brand is credible. It’s trusted. HCPs will turn to and recommend a brand they know, just like start-ups will turn to established CDMOs to develop their drug. This post will highlight some of the best practices of pharmaceutical branding and how a strategy can be created to promote this pharmaceutical brand.
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HOW TO CREATE A PHARMACEUTICAL BRAND STRATEGY
Assuming that the objectives of the strategy have been set – likely related to increasing customer loyalty, product differentiation or establishing your brand as a marketing leader – there are a number of considerations and moving parts that need to be addressed.
1. UNDERSTAND WHO YOU TRULY ARE
Marketing campaigns – and brands, for that matter – sometimes strive to be something they’re not, promoting content irrelevant to them and their audiences. They lead with propositions that do not relate to what they actually represent as organisations. Brands that misalign what they say with what they actually do can harm the performance of their marketing activities.
Successful brands and successful branding uses beliefs, values as well as their products, people and customers to guide them when establishing their brand strategy. The key here is to fully understand who you truly are. Together, these elements influence everything they do, every single day. And they often manifest in the form of a company vision, mission statement or brand values/purpose. When the organisation and the brand is aligned, not only do your customers and community grow due to your integrity, but your employees are happier and strive towards your company goals.
Of course, financial performance is imperative. Otherwise, there is no organisation to market and grow. So there should always be a company focus on becoming profitable (or at least break even) so that you can continue to service your customer and pay your employees. But the organisation needs to stay healthy and focusing on the value that you bring your customers is the best way to do that. (Know any pharmaceutical organisations that fall at this first hurdle?) This is who you are, and this underpins the brand strategy.
2. PHARMACEUTICAL BRAND PLANNING
Unfortunately, a brand strategy entails more than just understanding values. There are considerable planning tasks that need to happen: Almost like creating a full marketing plan. The good news is, unlike an annual marketing plan, your brand planning may not need to be revisited so often. This phase allocates resources to the strategy that enables a brand to deliver on its purpose.
Given the expectations, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity in the pharmaceutical sectors, planning the execution of the strategy isn’t easy. To convey this complexity, Strategy& find that 80% of European executives of pharmaceutical organisations interviewed “do not think that their current approaches, processes, and outputs are fit for purpose” with the key challenges for fixing this state being related to cultures within pharmaceutical organisations, as well as the “messy process” brand management can be. Add the external challenges of predicting the behaviours of R&D processes, procurement departments, HCPs and that of patients (as well as the cross-functional coordination and knowledge integration to assess these behaviours and need), then this conclusion is understandable.
The same research quoted above also revealed three key improvement levers that can help improve strategic brand planning: (1) Focused insights for more effective planning, (2) Lean, aligned, and agile processes, and (3) A cohesive organizational culture, combined with ownership and tech enablers.
Strategy&.
3. IDENTIFY THE BRAND/AUDIENCE SEGMENTS
As with any marketing venture, there exists the fundamental requirement of identifying and understanding the recipients of your messages and the consumers of your products and services.
Diffusion, segmentation quantification and calibration, for example, is often sought to encourage HCPs to adopt your product and recommend it to patients. It’s that segmentation that is important from a strategic brand perspective. In a previous post on pharmaceutical market segmentation, we identified that whether the target audience sits within B2B or B2C, with patients, HCPs or deeper within the supply chain, rarely will a pharmaceutical organisation emerge as large enough to serve the entire market, neither will it be able to serve all the target audience with a single message. This is why the brand strategy needs to be focused on a market segment that is more likely to respond positively to the organisation and its brand.
Buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers that help marketers visualise the ideal customer we're trying to attract. They are essential for introducing a new brand, and for the future branding of all marketing messaging and materials. Having a deep understanding of your buyer personas is a fundamental factor to ensure that what you are doing is consistent.
4. DISPOSITIONAL BRANDING
It’s worth noting a common type of approach for setting out a brand strategy in the pharmaceutical and related sectors: dispositional branding. The concept is used to associate a brand with a particular mood, situation, emotion or disposition, which is why you might encounter such an approach promoting OTC drugs and other pharmaceutical products and services. Dr Andree K Bates explains how it may work in Reuters Events (Pharma): “Many companies create ‘advocate panels’ and ‘advisory boards’ of Opinion Leader doctors. This allows the doctors to feel special, invited to be ‘in the club’, and boosts the doctors’ support of the product and their word-of-mouth marketing.”
Empathising with the customer in this manner is far from a new approach to brand strategy, but it’s often absent within a commercial context in any sector, not to mention in pharmaceuticals. Within our lives and within our job functions, we strive to be better versions of ourselves – if the organisations that we rely on to achieve this understand how we feel, they can cater for the things they do and say to help us. This is dispositional branding… where an emotional narrative is present in your brand and its subsequent marketing.
5. EFFECTIVE DESIGN
Design is at the heart of the branding process. Whilst the focus in pharma is to cure diseases, relieve pain, as well as help decision making throughout the wider pharmaceutical supply chain, the customer experience, branding as well as visual cues that aid this process is also important. Logos, typography, colours and the choices of imagery will all come into play here.
Subsign capture the importance of effective design in relation to some of the components of a brand strategy for which we have already discussed: “A human-centred approach to design in the healthcare industry can greatly improve your branding efforts, and the experience of the patient, who is in the end, the ultimate stakeholder. How can it do this? A company whose brand identity design that showcases the common values and views it has with the targeted audience can greatly enhance the emotional connection between them.”
6. “FACE BEHIND THE NAME”
We’re often drawn to the products and services of organisations, but often fail to recognise the organisations behind them. However, it seems now we’re more aware of the parent company. A recent PMLiVE article discusses an interesting event that has happened during the race to produce COVID-19 vaccines in this respect. They identify that perceptions of the pharmaceutical sectors have improved – and the pharmaceutical organisations themselves have started to become more famous.
“People want to know about the companies behind the products they buy – and that knowledge may influence which brands they choose. This is not restricted to consumer brands – we are seeing more B2B companies target consumers, including pharma, which is also embracing modern marketing methods to build awareness and growth.”
This creates both a challenge and an opportunity for pharmaceutical organisations with brand strategies. It means that closer scrutiny is given to the organisation’s values or mission, for example, so if that organisation’s branding isn’t up to scratch, they could potentially face some negativity, even if the product is highly effective. On the other hand, if the brand strategy is watertight, it can significantly improve the organisation’s relations with the public. “Pharma companies are now following the likes of FMCG giant P&G – which has championed elevating a corporate brand voice to speak to consumers – and using marketing and communications to engage with consumers. Last year, Pfizer promoted its corporate brand with ‘Science Will Win’ adverts in preference to spots previously reserved for its products.”
7. THE BRAND VALUE PROPOSITION
Done well, a brand strategy can create significant competitive advantage and capture the full value of a product, service and company. A strong brand can make or break a new product launch in a new region. Just like it can make or break a marketing plan. And as previously touched upon, it can also help with employee and stakeholder relations. This is where the value proposition as a marketing mechanism comes in.
A value proposition refers to the value a company promises to deliver to customers should they choose to buy their product, and as w touched upon, functional as well as emotional benefits need to be communicated. For B2C, the benefits go beyond the drug itself and can relate to patient outcomes and additional support services offered by the brand. And the value proposition is not just a statement of the benefits of the products and services to reinforce the core proposition to differentiate it from competitors. It also acts as a driver for developing content and communicating messages that will strategically fit with its intended audience, providing a direction for all marketing messages. Once again, it’s communicated throughout, but the focus here is on the outright value you provide those that buy from your organisation.
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8. ARTICULATING THE MESSAGE
With the above defined, it’s now time to take the brand to the marketplace; communicating all that your brand is within your marketing communications. Having a brand is one thing; communicating the message in an honest, authentic and consistent manner is something else. The brand will have its own personality, consisting of some key characteristics and attributes, all of which will reflect your values as an organisation. You will also have your own tone of voice, which means the way in which your pharmaceutical brand sounds and speaks, and the manner it does so. Your voice may be authoritative, but the tone is respectful and empathetic.
Taglines are often developed, that often supports key communication channels as well as some key brand assets (such as logos) to articulate this message. The tagline is a sentence, phrase, or word used to summarise a market position. Messaging concepts (or pillars) are also derived from the brand: key stories you want to talk about your brand and what makes you unique. Every piece of content will reinforce these core messages across all touchpoints. The message will also refer to the vision and mission statement spoken about in #1.
As stated on Lumen, once you have drafted an initial set of key messages, it’s helpful to prioritise and organise them into a framework that helps you tell a coherent story.
Lumen.
9. DON’T DEFINE AGAINST A COMPETITOR
We’ve covered so much so far. So, this consideration is brief and simple: don’t define your brand strategy against a competitor. You will always be stifled if you are too focused on others. Keep a close eye on competitors for obvious competitive reasons, but from a branding perspective, keep them out of the equation. If you truly are unique (which a brand will be) your competitors are not even in the picture.
10. ONGOING BRAND MANAGEMENT
Although the branding process isn’t one that needs to be undertaken on an annual basis, unlike the marketing planning process, ongoing management of the brand is completely essential. The “owners” of the brand – usually the marketers, communications or brand managers – will take overall responsibility for the brand but it would need to include all functions of the organisations to do so effectively. This is because all of these functions and departments work together to create the single promise of brand value.
As marketers, we’re fully aware of the document that is brand guidelines, for example. It ensures all departments are aware of the individual facets of the brand, its purpose and missions, but also the parameters which employees must work within so that all communication is on-brand and consistent with other communication and messages from other departments. Without this kind of management, the organisation will stray from its purpose, promote inconsistent materials, and weaken the brand by failing to build trust.
Brand management begins at #1, even before products have been authorised and launched, and continue after their use has expired. This is why departments need to be aligned – and this certainly includes the alignment of sales and marketing via a closed-loop approach.
11. MANAGING RISK
Part of the brand management process consists of managing risk because uncertainty and various threats can be found at all intersections within the pharmaceutical sectors (such as the impact COIVD-19 had on all manufacturing) that can damage a brand and an organisation’s reputation. Uptake Strategies highlight a few statistics that support this further: Across all major industries, 72% of all product launches fail to meet their revenue targets and 83% of companies are suffering from strong price pressure. All of which can be attributed – in some way or another – back to the brand.
Risks are defined as a future uncertain outcome, usually with a negative impact on the brand that can be quantified. This should be distinguished from an uncertainty which is generally more difficult to quantify and can be positive or negative in its impact on the brand. Uptake suggests that risks can be characterised in different ways: known and unknown, internal and external – a 2×2 box could help you plot and present your risks in this way.
M&As, which as common in pharmaceuticals, present risks for brands, and any merger as such would need to be managed very closely before the risk of one of the two organisations (which are likely to uphold different values) can be negatively affected. Integrating the acquired pharmaceutical brand is a specialist process; and organisations will need to create stable, value-generating brands that will withstand changes and preserve the core of their strengths, ultimately leading to consistent and unified brand presence.
12. EFFECTIVE MANAGEMENT OF BRAND STRATEGIES IN PHARMA
Challenges will always present themselves to pharmaceutical brand managers. Trademark development, multiple levels of stakeholders and external factors that affect everything that you do are just some of the obvious ones as we conclude this post. But brands can be created that build relationships with customers and clients beyond a functional feature or product benefit, which results in long-term success. The opportunity here is large.
The pharmaceutical sector suffers from a general lack of trust, therefore, it’s becoming more conscious of the strategic brand. This brand can be used in all activities in a unified brand promise, which is made tangible at all brand touchpoints, internally and externally to that organisation, and isn’t a marketing activity on its own.
For more on branding and brand strategy in the pharmaceutical sectors, and how we can help you, visit our section on strategy.