The end of winning and the pursuit of parity

While in the middle of listening to my most recent commuting book Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works, I was particularly struck by this sentence…

“Most companies aren’t actively playing to win; they're just participating in their market.”

The idea that we’re not really all trying to win feels odd – it feels wrong. But what landed with me about this was that in a pharma context, almost everyone uses the same CRM tech, the same approval software, selects the same three network agencies, buys the same laptops, and there’s even one business park I go to where three pharma companies have the exact same office in the exact same location.

Is doing the same things as everyone else trying to win or is it just participating?

And the planning to just play goes further – planning tools, frameworks, systems, customer engagement tactics, and organisational structures are typically the same or very similar in most of pharma (so much so that I’d guess most employees of company A could probably walk into company B’s office and not notice).

In all these areas, many pharma companies are intentionally not competing – nobody is trying to win in any of these areas they are just chasing parity.

The universal lack of winning focus

A great way to reflect on this yourself is to think about the business you work in right now – are you as a business really the winner at anything?

• Is there anything about your capabilities, systems or set-up that is uniquely better than those of any other company in your space?
• Do you have the lowest-cost or most efficient model?
• Do you have the most distinct or differentiated brand?

And if not, are you really trying to win in any of these areas, or are you just happy to be playing in the same space in the same way as everyone else? I suspect, when most of us think about it, we’re just competing (perhaps reasonably well), but why are we not trying to win, to be the best we can be? In the end, just competing will very slowly result in the decline of margins and threaten the business.

How to choose where to win

In part because it’s what I’m reading currently, and because it will be familiar to many (it’s been widely used in pharma and underpins numerous pharma planning frameworks), we’ll use the framework from Playing to Win to structure the choices we can make.

The five core elements are largely self-explanatory. However, using them to win, rather than just compete, means asking some tough questions:

Customers:

• What do your customers specifically value about your brand compared with their other choices?
• Which scenarios are customers most open to using the brand more in? And which are they most resistant to? So often, pharma launches struggle because the company is determined the brand is going to be the first-line choice for every patient from the start. They refuse to start talking about or showcasing experience and value in small subpopulations or later lines and work up to earlier broader use for fear of being niched
• Are there customer groups that other companies have ignored? Might you be able to gain an advantage by aiming beyond the most established thought leaders, or by really investing early in working with nurses?

Relative position:

• How does the brand currently fare relative to the competition and why?
• Where does the brand currently win, where does it have the potential to win and where is it very unlikely to ever win?

Competition:

• What areas or segments do they dominate in and why? And what might they do when you enter the market? What little question marks will they raise about your data, and what can you do about it?
• Where can’t you beat them? Strategy is as much about what you choose not to do as it is about what you do. Choosing not to compete where you can’t win frees up resources so you can win elsewhere.

Capabilities:

• Is there anything about your set-up, your sales force, your infrastructure or your agencies that offer an advantage, and if not, could they?
• Is there anything you can offer that others don’t in your space? For example, home care, free initiation periods, or early-access programmes?

Value and budget spend:

• Cutting the price is typically a no-go. However, brands do get used because they are the cheapest. There’s also how value can be added. Patient support programmes are the classic example but getting creative about shared risk approaches can certainly move the needle
• Budget allocations can be critical, including how early budgets on preparing for launch are in place, how big they are, and how they get allocated are hugely important. For example, launches where field teams are late to be recruited almost always suffer.

Planning to win

While questions and frameworks can help with the process, ultimately winning comes down to ruthless focus and the right cultural mindset.

No organisation exemplifies this mindset better than the British Olympic team. After years of failure and underperformance (underpinned by a participation mindset), British Olympics was transformed by complete dedication to the playing-to-win mindset. They started by being very concentrated on their spending. They removed funding in all but a very targeted group of sports including cycling, rowing, sailing, swimming and horse riding. The where-to-play thinking was simple – play only where most countries in the world can’t afford to compete. This hugely reduced the competitor set.

They then used the financial edge created by relentlessly pursuing every advantage to ensure they beat the competition. They did the following:

• spent on the best facilities, equipment, coaching, psychology and talent scouting
• trained parents and partners in how to help support athletes at home
• employed the best doctors, physiotherapists and nutritionists.

Literally no detail was left unexplored in the pursuit of winning – they even transported pillows, mattresses, and duvets with athletes to try to ensure they slept as well as possible while travelling.

The result of this unwavering emphasis on winning in these focus areas was that Britain went from 36th in the medals table in Atlanta in 1996 to 2nd in Rio de Janeiro in 2016 – winning 67 medals.

In pharma, examples of this same mindset exist in pockets:

• Focussing on being fastest: a few companies have invested significantly in launch excellence and particularly in understanding how they can accelerate activities to maximise awareness and engagement at launch
• Integrated systems: a small number of outliers are moving from industry-standard separate systems and platforms for field detailing, marketing-led webinars, mass email and online content to one bespoke platform
• Marketing excellence: because of the scientific nature of pharma, many in commercial roles don’t have formal marketing qualifications. Some companies are countering this through focused training and marketing excellence programmes

These are all good starts on really trying to win. And these advantages, when combined, add up. If these companies continue actively looking at where they are competing on a level playing field with competitors and investing in finding advantages – in winning, not just competing – they will gradually move ahead of their competition. As with the British Olympic team, these gains may be marginal in isolation, but as they start to accumulate, they become overwhelming drivers of success.