Creating a medico-marketing strategy for a product basket of a single therapy area

Pharma and medical device #marketers often face a common dilemma. How to sell multiple products in the basket for the same indication. You might have an anti-hypertensive as old as #nifedipine along with a #telmisartan, #antidiabetic agents as old as a #metformin or #glimepiride with the latest DPP-4 inhibitor or GLP-1 analog, an #anticancer drug that is being used for decades along with a newer more potent drug, a new device that has more features along with an old one that gets you the volumes and value.

While every marketer desires that they can do away with the old product(s) and can get the entire sales of the old one(s) from the new product plus good incremental sales from the new product, it remains wishful thinking. In reality, one has to live with the basket, with the pressure of maintaining or even increasing the sales of the old product(s) and generating additional sales from the new one(s). Hence, a deeply thought strategy is a must, and #medicalaffairs has a vital role to play here.

In such a scenario, it might help to create distinct patient profiles for each product, as a communication strategy. A patient profile should be like an image that easily comes up as a visual in the HCP's mind. To be able to do this successfully, one needs to minutely read the latest literature on the products in the basket. One will often find additional information that helps in creating the profile. Some examples are below:

• Some older molecules might have pleotropic effects that can be used to position them for patients with/without certain characteristics/comorbidities, those with specific demographic characteristics, or those taking other medications, having specific laboratory results. or results of any other investigations, those with specific past or family history etc.
• Some molecules might have shown best outcomes in some patient profiles such as younger/older patients, those with high/low BMI, pre-menopausal/post-menopausal women, those having high triglycerides only with other lipids being normal etc.
• Some newer #anticancer drugs might have approval for first-line therapy but HCPs might want to keep them as reserve drugs. However, pivotal trials will often show patient profiles/subgroup analyses in which outcomes were the best. These profiles can be used for communication for the use of the new drug as first-line therapy in those specific patient profiles. Even the use in restricted patient profiles will provide HCPs an experience of the use of the drug, which could later increase their confidence of using it more widely as the first-line drug.
• A smart #marketer or #medicalaffairs professional would be always on the lookout for newer/latest studies even on old molecules like metformin and glimepiride. In the last one year, there have been some amazing new studies on these molecules, indicating that these drugs very much have their place in anti-diabetic therapy despite guidelines slowly moving towards newer drugs as first-line therapy. In non-reimbursed markets like India, it is not very easy to move directly to newer drugs as first-line therapy, due to cost reasons.
• Minutely reading through the guidelines often provides new insights. We often tend to read only the executive summary and the final recommendations, because guidelines often run into more than 100 pages, but they contain a wealth of information.
• Moreover, this is an ongoing process as new evidence keeps coming up and one needs to keep pace with it.

Once you have shortlisted the evidence-based communication points for each product, it might be helpful to present it like a patient case with a visual. This will help in creating a distinct visual image in the mind and a sort of brand identity.

Once these are done, the next step is coming up with innovative methods of communicating the profiles, which is a topic for another day.

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