We all position drugs, every day

There are a couple of reactions to ‘positioning’ within pharma: one is that it’s something Marketing will do later (and that that’s OK), and the other is that it’s not really clear what positioning ‘is’…

So, let’s take the example of the past couple of years, that you’ve all experienced. I want you to think about how?you?positioned Covid vaccines, because I have no doubt you did.

When you’re explaining them to your daughter, or your grandfather, or your Facebook friends, let’s examine your use of?framing?and?value.

Did you import the general framing of ‘a vaccine’? That is, were you hoping to borrow attributes from vaccines ‘in general’? Polio, flu, travel vaccines, mumps? It should be a careful consideration:?you?may well understand the traditional role of a vaccine way more than your daughter might. It is easy in positioning to assume that you and your audience understand the exact same thing when you use words, or that they understand nothing, but the hard reality lives in the middle - they probably understand them differently.

Remember, there have been good and bad vaccines approved previously, too, and it’s hard to selectively import only positive attributes and experiences. There’s a wide range of ‘efficacy’ out there, which is potentially a statistic that pharma knows better than the general public. For example,?this chart?from pre-approval…

Some of this seems obvious, but you learn when you do positioning right, nothing should be obvious, or taken for granted. As soon as you accept calling it ‘a vaccine’ or ‘get your flu shot’ or ‘get a jab’ or ‘you are now vaccinated’, you accept the good and the bad. Alternatives could include prophylactic therapeutic, pre-emptive immunisation, etc. When you leave it ‘loose’, you’re inviting your audience to fill in their own thoughts.

Next, what should one?expect?of a vaccine? Is it prevention of infection, prevention of transmission, prevention of illness, prevention of serious illness or death? All of those (in a cascade effect)? That talks to the value proposition. Is one more important than the other? Is your value proposition ‘protection’, and on which dimension?

How did you address durability? Did you extrapolate from analogues or from your own modelling? How did your expected duration of effect change the story?

When you said that the vaccine was effective, in what way did you provide evidence, or reasons to believe your claim? Was it statistical significance, or clinical significance? Did you show charts, or data tables??

How did you frame the context: approved vaccine versus emergency use? In this scenario you imported trust in the approval bodies and governing bodies. Who did the talking? Was it you or a chosen expert? Did you provide full transparency or choose your news carefully?

You needed to think through the value proposition to the population, but also to the individual. Were you vaccinating your daughter for her benefit (which benefit did you choose?) or for someone else’s?

Think about your use of segmentation. Does your value proposition apply equally to everyone, or is it particularly focused on elderly, or vulnerable patients for example? Clearly here your choice of value proposition was interdependent with your segmentation.

Did you then choose to frame all of the vaccines together, or to pull them apart? Were they a ‘class’ (for example, ‘all approved vaccines’) or did you suggest, for example, that the mRNA vaccines were different, and in what way? Did you try to suggest that the mRNA vaccines weren’t ‘a class’, but two very different products (and how did you do on that?)?

How did you explain the Mechanism of Disease? Did you stop at ‘virus’ or delve into spike proteins, upper vs lower respiratory binding. How did that link to your Mechanism of Effect, or Mechanism of Action? How about your differentiation story? Did your choice of mechanism narrative talk to your immunogenicity, without addressing the downsides? How did that impact your side effect/ adverse event story? How much did you need to educate your audience on T cells, spike proteins, mRNA or more, before your story would gain traction?

These, and a hundred other considerations, all attach to the value proposition (which, if you do it right, is interchangeable with the positioning). Now, consider that you’re not doing it to just one person - you’re doing it to everyone. Does your messaging change depending on who you’re talking to? With positioning, your core positioning can’t: even though you can vary messaging by audience, it has to hang from your core positioning.?

If your proposition is that all vaccines are not the same, that yours is more effective at preventing severe disease in vulnerable populations, can you double check that?that?is what you studied, and how you delivered your headline messages? Or, did you get drawn into standard studies, or meaningless comparisons of headline numbers, framed by someone else’s positioning, even though your study populations were different?

Positioning is hard, but we all do it, intentionally or not. Even with this example, you can see how positioning should track into Development choices, and therefore is not cosmetic, or gift wrapping data someone else chose to collect. Like any other discipline in early phase, how well you do it will have a great impact later.