Do traditional market research methods work as we seek to evolve our understanding of pharmaceutical markets?

As human beings we learn by encountering new pieces of information. Our brains fit this new information into existing schemas of how we understand the world. As a result, these schemas change, evolving our perspective.

This process is constant. In fact, it’s often the new pieces of information being incorporated into our existing schemas that allow us to make sense of information currently beyond our comprehension.

For example, humans used to sit around a fire for light but by understanding electricity, we could go on to invent batteries and then use them to power a torch.

For a real-life example from a client job carried out this year, we didn’t really understand how and in whom, a physician might want to use a product the client was developing or whether the intended patient would be willing to take the product as proposed, and so we were in no position to ask a payer if they would pay for it. We didn’t know which usage circumstances to ask the payer about.

We needed to iterate our knowledge through a number of steps to be able to make sense of the conversation with the payer.

Our approach involved a rapid sequence of conversations, that went physicians, physicians again, patients, payers, patients again, physicians again, patients again and ultimately payers where we finally got to the bottom of the issue. With each step our understanding evolved until we started asking the right questions of the payer. And this is not trivial. It’s changing the Target Product Profile, influencing clinical trial design and impacting the shape of investor decks.

Traditional market research and by that, I mean the vast majority of market research carried out by the pharmaceutical industry today, tends to focus on a single audience at a time and spends 2 to 3 months to ask a single set of questions to that single audience.

Using a traditional approach in the above example, and being generous on timing and costs, would have taken a year and a half, cost a quarter of a million pounds and pushed the launch timeline back a year or more realistically and additionally would have resulted in the wrong positioning, wrong data and the wrong price, followed by a spectacular underperformance.

In fact, in this very category, the payers drew our attention to a recent launch of a competitor suffering from these very problems.

In contrast, we took 6 months and around ￡70k to arrive at a position everyone feels a lot more confident in. Time will tell if we are right but certainly, we can be sure we’ve iterated our understanding of things many more times already by taking this approach. And if we really needed a confidence boost, 3 weeks and another ￡20k would buy a rapid quant of 100 physicians to check our hypothesis. No one felt this was needed!

Now don’t get me wrong, the traditional approach has its place for things like tracking and validating assumptions, as mentioned above, but if you need to learn and sharpen your perspective so you can feel confident making important decisions, I’d suggest, an iterative approach might often be a better way to work.

Get in touch if you want to discuss further.