Pharmaceutical brands: state of the
pharmaceutical brandscape
Pharmaceutical branding strategies
Pharmaceutical branding describes the process whereby companies attempt
to transform an active chemical compound into a recognisable package of
associated brand values. These values, such as effectiveness, safety, trust and
other more emotional associations, have become increasingly important levers
through which pharmaceutical marketers can look to achieve greater market share
and loyalty in an evermore competitive market space. Pharmaceutical branding
efforts impact on a range of related strategies, including brand name
development, Rx-to-OTC switching, DTC marketing, PR and corporate
communications.
Rather than present a generalised summary of current perspectives in pharmaceutical
branding strategies, this report brings together the different views found from
across the industry, presented directly from the experiences of leading experts
in the field. The report contains the views of ten experts drawn from across
different sectors of the branding arena, including industry product and marketing
managers, advertising agency executives and management consultants. In an
attempt to shed light on the future direction of this dynamic topic, Pharmaceutical
Branding Strategies provides a unique window into the perspectives and
experiences of those leaders at the forefront of shaping that future.
There are a number of reasons why pharmaceutical brands have become more
important. First of all you have got to create more value from your molecule above
and beyond the obvious benefit. Secondly you want to create an entity that is
differentiable from your competitors. In addition to that, you have the
potential to create a sustainable entity through which to leverage the value of
your brand.
Pharmaceutical companies need to clearly define the value that their
brands have in the marketplace above-and-beyond that of the competition. Only
by clearly defining and managing that value can they begin to build and
leverage brand equity moving forward.
The importance of pharmaceutical
brands
If you look at why people create brands, there are a number of reasons.
Fundamentally, they include being able to sell a product at a higher price and
being able to create a sustainable entity through which to differentiate it
from the competition and to leverage the brand going forward. If you look at
the traditional pharmaceutical model, the model was to invest a lot of money to
develop an innovative product for which you get a patent life and when that
patent is over you launch a new product. Once a molecule was approved you could
more-or-less charge anything you like, and so pricing was never really an
issue. The life of the brand was seen to last only as long as the life of the patent,
and so it was not really possible to create a sustainable entity. Therefore, traditionally,
pharmaceutical brands were created to build awareness. When pharmaceutical
marketers talked about branding what they really meant was brand awareness and
whether or not a physician recognizes your product.
If you look at what has happened in pharmaceutical marketing over more
recent years, a number of key factors can be extrapolated that have impacted on
the way in which brands are now viewed and developed. First there are
considerable price pressures going on. The differences in prices between Europe
and the US are huge, with European markets much more restricted in what they
are willing to pay for pharmaceutical products. Pharmaceutical pricing has
become increasingly important, where “if I am going to pay that much money for
something it had better be worth it”. This trend is now evident in the US with
the recent Medicare/Medicaid reforms meaning that individual states will have a
significant drug bill, beginning to put the same sort of pressure on US prices
that European governments currently exert on European prices.
Secondly, typically what used to happen in the pharmaceutical industry
was that companies would develop and launch a new molecule that was many times
better than the last one. It was probably more effective, it was probably much
safer and worked faster, lasted longer and had all sorts of tangible benefits.
If you go back to the 1980s and 1990s, you would also have the market to
yourself for maybe 4 or 5 years after launch. However, now the whole model has
changed. Innovations are smaller and smaller – it is getting harder and harder
to produce significant improvements. New drugs may work in different ways, but
they rarely work much better than the previous drugs on the market. As a
result, distinguishing your drug has become very important and the chance of
you having the market to yourself for any significant period of time has become
pretty slim.
Finally, there is such pressure now, particularly with the big pharma
companies, to be able to deliver a double digit growth every year that they are
required to bill several billion dollars in drug sales each year. As a result
the time to launching new drugs and marketing them into blockbusters has been
squeezed into a much shorter timeframe. Thus, the traditional models that were
set up to monitor adverse side effects by the Food and Drug Administration
(FDA) and others, setting limits to the total number of adverse effects within
a short period after launch, are no longer appropriate. For example, setting a
limit of 100 adverse effects in the first three months on the market, but then
having an accelerated launch, means you are likely to see many more adverse effects
than expected. The problem is are there really more adverse side effects than
expected or is it just a function of an accelerated launch?
So there are a number of reasons why pharmaceutical brands have become
more important. First of all you have got to create more value from your
molecule above and beyond the obvious benefit. Secondly you want to create an
entity that is differentiable from your competitors. In addition to that, you
have the potential to create a sustainable entity through which to leverage the
value of your brand. For example, if you take Prilosec and Nexium, they have
been able to try and leverage the values they had in their brand using the color
purple and the vehicle of ‘the purple pill’. The brand elements that were
associated with Prilosec, that were built well in advance of its decline
following patent expiry, were leveraged into the Nexium brand. Another example
of brand leverage is Claritin and Clarinex. Claritin never really had any discernable value other than it was a
non-drowsy antihistamine, but Schering-Plough has leveraged that nicely into
Clarinex.
So pharmaceutical branding initially was just about brand awareness and
being able to make sure that you maximize awareness. Now it is much more about
the value that my brand has over-and-above competitors in the marketplace.
Pharmaceutical branding today is about expressing brand value – about
expressing something else about the product that is valuable to either the
patient, physician, or any relevant audience.
If you want Dissertations on Pharmaceutical Branding Strategies, Contact Writers at Mahasagar Publications.
