Leveraging Integrated Insights for Brand Repositioning to Reignite Growth

Thorough Primary Marketing Research and Data Analytics Are Indispensable for Companies Seeking to Reposition Underperforming Brands to Maximize Their Potential

By Noah M Pines, ThinkGen

Repositioning: Transforming Under-Performing Brands into Growth Engines

In today’s pharmaceutical industry, much of the spotlight—and investment—is on new product launches. Yet, hidden within the portfolio of established in-line brands, especially those which are under-performing, lies a wealth of untapped growth potential. When an in-line brand isn’t reaching its full potential, a strategic repositioning can be a powerful catalyst—revitalizing its market presence, unlocking new opportunities, and driving it toward sustained or even accelerated growth.

However, successful repositioning is almost never the result of guesswork; it demands a systematic multi-faceted approach that is rooted in primary marketing research and thorough data analysis. By leveraging data-driven insights, pharma companies can more deeply understand customer perceptions and behaviors, surface unmet needs and opportunities, and realign/reboot their brands to address these gaps effectively.

Leveraging customer insights and data not only minimizes the risks associated with repositioning but also enhances the potential for a brand to connect (or re-connect) meaningfully with both HCPs and consumers, elevating customers’ trust and loyalty.

Revitalizing Established Brands: No Easy Feat

Repositioning a pharma brand presents unique challenges due to several factors intrinsic to our industry. The first is trust - everywhere in healthcare, trust is paramount. Customers -- health care providers (HCPs), patients, and other health care stakeholders - may already have established perceptions about a brand’s overall purpose and utility, as well as its specific attributes: its efficacy, side effect profile, and so on.

Repositioning can risk creating customer confusion or skepticism, particularly if the new positioning diverges significantly from how the brand is currently viewed. You can't transform a cat into an elephant, as a client of ours observed during some recent re-positioning research.

Secondly, in pharma, repositioning a brand often requires fresh scientific evidence to support new claims. This process can be challenging, as identifying new applications or benefits may demand further clinical trials or research, which are costly, time-intensive, and not always guaranteed to produce the desired results. Increasingly, companies are turning to Real-World Evidence (RWE) as a strategic tool to build customer trust, highlight unique product advantages, and strengthen brand positioning. RWE leverages data from real-life patient experiences to provide meaningful insights that can validate a product’s effectiveness, offering a valuable alternative or complement to traditional clinical research.

Third, the pharmaceutical industry is intensely competitive, with numerous companies promoting similar products. To reposition a brand effectively, it’s essential to craft a unique and compelling value proposition that sets it apart. Achieving this differentiation is no easy task, especially as competitors continuously adapt and refine their own strategies. A technique often employed to anticipate these shifts is Competitive Simulation, or “War Games,” which enables companies to explore potential competitor strategies, how they might evolve over time and ways for the “home team” to maintain an advantage.

Lastly, once a brand is repositioned, significant investment is required to educate HCPs, patients and other stakeholders with a consistent message about its new role. This may involve retraining sales teams, revising marketing materials, and launching new promotional campaigns to ensure that the repositioned product is understood and embraced. These initiatives require substantial resources and may not guarantee success, especially if the market is slow to adapt to the repositioning.

These challenges make pharmaceutical brand repositioning a complex endeavor that demands careful planning, strategic investment, and a thorough understanding of the market, the competitive environment, and potentially most importantly, the psychology of the target customer.

A Systematic Insights-Driven Process for Repositioning Is Essential

To effectively reposition a pharmaceutical brand, we at ThinkGen collaborate closely with our clients to plan and implement a structured and systematic program of primary and secondary research, as well as data analytics, to gather and integrate the necessary insights and statistics that will inform the team's decision-making. Following are the key steps or phases within this process.

• Align on the Achievable Goals of Repositioning: The first step in any repositioning endeavor is to figure out what our client aims to achieve through repositioning, whether it is the availability of new data, targeting a new customer segment, or simply just striving to boost an underperforming brand's adoption. As noted earlier, re-positioning is often more easily achieved when there is some type of an occurrence or event - a new clinical study, a fundamental shift in the market, a new health care trend, etc. At the same time, ThinkGen has helped companies who discover that an attribute or attributes of their brand aren't well-understood by customers, or who believe that by shifting the emphasis of promotion, it will be possible to capture more business.
• Conduct a Thorough Market and Competitive Analysis: Often the recognition that a brand can or should be repositioned is the result of a thorough secondary analysis of industry trends, growth opportunities, or unmet needs. It is also critical to look at the evolving competitive landscape: how existing and expected new market entrants are positioning themselves. These types of analysis can reveal gaps in the market that the repositioned brand could fill.
• Execute Primary Marketing Research to Explore Market Needs: The first phase of primary marketing research is exploratory qualitative work aimed at evaluating the potential for re-positioning a brand. This entails research with different customer segments, for example high users vs. low users. The team should think about which segments might align best with the repositioned brand’s intended benefits, and/or identify potential new customer groups that would respond to the brand’s revised positioning. Our efforts typically delve deeply into the customer decision-making psychology within the therapeutic category, perceptions and usage of existing and new medications, and the impact of trends and new advancements. If the occasion for the repositioning is a set of new data or an emergent market trend, those should be shared as stimuli in the research.
• Assess Brand Perception and Equity: As part and parcel of the qualitative research, the research team should also investigate how the brand is currently perceived and used by HCPs and consumers, assessing factors such as trust, relevance and how it is used in everyday practice. The team should examine the brand’s equity, including awareness, recognition, perceived quality, and loyalty, to understand the current strengths and weaknesses that can be leveraged or addressed in repositioning.
• Identify Repositioning Opportunities and Develop Testable Concepts: Based on the exploratory research findings, the next step is for ThinkGen to lead a workshop aimed at identifying a range of repositioning hypotheses that align with the brand’s unique advantages and market opportunities. These hypotheses should be developed into concepts - testable stimuli for marketing research - and should be structured in the same way as they would be for launch positioning concepts, i.e., Premise/Promise and Proof.
• Pressure Test Re-Positioning Concepts: Phase two of the primary research involves testing these positioning concepts with target audiences to gauge how well they resonate, and their likely impact on future behaviors relative to the brand and its competition. Key evaluative metrics would include resonance, differentiation and motivation to change or grow utilization consonant with the commercial objectives. Customer feedback can be used to refine these repositioning concepts to maximize their impact.

With the results of the repositioning research in hand, a second workshop often is convened to align on a strategy. Once that strategy has been crystallized, next steps beyond that include a message refresh; selection of key marketing channels to reach the target audiences; and other aspects of the implementation plan (i.e., plans for rolling out the new marketing campaigns, sales training, and stakeholder education initiatives).

After the launch of the new positioning campaign, the team should track its progress by closely monitoring key performance indicators (KPIs) such as brand awareness, prescription rates, and market share to measure the effectiveness of the repositioning initiative.

Case Study: Transforming a Cat into a Tiger

Recently, ThinkGen was engaged to conduct a multi-phased research and consulting initiative to help boost the market share of a cancer treatment to be more in line with management's expectations. In accordance with the steps enumerated above, ThinkGen conducted a comprehensive market analysis to assess the different customer segments in the market and to understand their treatment psychology and needs.

The qualitative discussion guides were strategically crafted to ground both in the present (to understand current perceptions) and be forward-looking (to understand aspirations for the future). Team ThinkGen’s analysis bridged between the present and the future to inform a set of re-positioning concepts.?Importantly, our insights were intentionally broad, allowing the brand team and their advertising agency partner to draft four re-positioning concepts with distinct territories for testing.

As a next step, the ThinkGen research team tested these positioning concepts.?The customer feedback demonstrated that the product’s most prominent point of differentiation was perceived to be a barrier among low users and non-adopters (where there were the greatest opportunities for growth); and there was low awareness of points of differentiation that were deemed to be more important by the target customers.?With a research-informed adjustment, the revised positioning statement shifted the focus to the attributes that were more relevant and vital to HCPs' decision-making process – and provided the compelling why’s to drive growth.

The end result was a fortified position statement that was meaningful, distinctive, ownable, and sustainable – the hallmarks of competitive positioning that ThinkGen researchers routinely inform.

Conclusion

Repositioning in-line brands affords pharma companies a potent strategy to extend, but more importantly, to elevate the value of their existing product portfolios. Building upon the established efficacy, safety profiles, and market presence of their brands, companies can open new therapeutic opportunities, target unmet patient needs, and differentiate their offerings in increasingly competitive markets.

By investing in systematically conducted market research and data analysis led by experienced consultants, pharma companies can unlock untapped potential in their in-line brands, thereby driving sustained growth, enhancing patient outcomes, and achieving a more resilient, adaptive and high-performance portfolio.