Same thing, different results: how does generic strategy yield blockbuster performance?

I go to a lot of concerts. I can’t promise you’d enjoy many of them (my last year’s?‘best 120 songs’ is here…), but I can promise you that you’d enjoy them a lot?less?if you were standing behind me… At 6’5” (or 198cm, if you prefer), it makes sense that people would rather be in front of me. However, I also tend to?like?being right at the front.

So, I have a ‘concert strategy’. First, obviously, is getting hold of tickets. I prefer small shows/ small rooms, which often increases pressure on this step. But many of you will have experienced the anxiety of ticketing systems for bigger shows these days - waiting in the ‘queue’, told not to refresh, while your social media pings with people who’ve secured 6 tickets. My multi-window, multi-device chops are strong, but so is my game for pre-sales. Let’s accept that, if you’re looking for tickets, you’re up against someone who plays as seriously as I do…

Musicians who want to capitalise on the value of scarcity can decide to do so. Just because?you?can’t imagine paying $8500?per ticket?for Adele doesn’t mean someone won’t…

This is a great mechanism to see value going to the musician, rather than touts or resellers, but it isn’t what most of us call ‘fair’ (there is a huge ethical conversation about what ‘fair’ means in record label world, of course - nothing is ever straightforward…?Gratuitous link to a playlist from my label ????). Would ‘fair’ be based on a mechanism other than willingness and ability to pay? If it would, no-one has yet agreed on it.

The ‘concert strategy’ goes beyond the tickets, of course. Deciding where you want to be in the room matters, and therefore, obviously you have a choice to make about what ‘doors’ time means, how much of the support acts you want to see/ endure, your drinks strategy and more. So many factors determine if your time in front of the stage is optimised.?(You can perhaps see even more now why you might not enjoy the concert experience with me…!)?It is easy therefore to see why some prefer to increase their chance of avoiding the fate of the ‘average’ concert-goer.

However, all of these factors are true of a market that you can expect to be crowded, too. All pharmaceutical markets are crowded. Even the ones with high unmet medical need are crowded, often with indirect competition. Your drug will be displacing something - whether that ‘something’ is focused on symptoms or some other disease burden. Hoping that you can decide ‘on the night’ how to optimise your view of the show can’t work. If you’ve waited until phase III to start to worry about market access, you’re already too late.

This, of course, is the greatest failure of the ‘benchmarking’ mindset - that if you just do the same as others you’ll somehow outperform them. Path to market, and then go to market, cannot be based on generic strategy unless you want generic/ average results. Even worse, ‘doing the same as others’ might not even be based on others in the same therapy area. Most generic strategy is based on doing the same as every other drug in your?pipeline. “We do want a different outcome, but we’re committed to doing the same thing over and over…” seems odd given how often that ‘insanity’ adage has been drummed into us.

That applies to fascinatingly odd choices, too. For example, many companies use industry averages for therapy area attrition in their?own?PTS calculations. Guess what? It is a negative spiral - taking a CNS attrition rate from the past 10 years in pharma and compare it to oncology, and all of your decisions will be to prioritise oncology. The sources of low decision quality/ decision error in pharma are often just so banal.

Crowded markets are crowded because most companies go with the crowd. But crowded markets aren’t crowded for everyone…