Challenge

Standing out in a crowd is always difficult in a highly-competitive, saturated therapy area. That’s especially true when physicians have multiple treatment options and a company’s medicine is not the first to market. In order to optimize commercial opportunities and overcome barriers at both the market and brand level, companies must develop effective brand strategies for product differentiation to ultimately drive brand growth.

A multinational biotech company – owning some of the biggest brands in and beyond oncology – was looking to establish one of their oncology assets as a therapy of choice for multiple lines of treatment, pre- and post-resection. The company’s medicine is active in a therapy area where there are multiple treatments options, including targeted therapies and chemotherapies, and opportunities and barriers exist at both the market and brand level. At the market level, there are challenges in growing the relatively newer drug class versus the existing standard of choice; while from a brand perspective, the remit is to gain market share. The company’s leadership is also challenging its brand managers to defend equity against up and coming new competitor entrants.

These considerations make it imperative for the company to develop an evidence based brand strategy, excel in strategy execution, whilst demonstrating agility in adapting to the fast-evolving market.

Approach

The company engaged the Health Division of Cerner Enviza for its strong commercialization expertise and clear focus on identifying brand growth opportunities. Cerner Enviza designed and executed a winning strategy for this engagement using Brand Equity – A Brand Plus™ Analytics solution. We transformed a 'traditional' brand tracker into a powerful and predictive tool. This enabled our client to clearly identify growth potential and risk, as well as sources of growth and risk, and thereby priorities decisions on brand strategy refinements across experience, access and sales representative execution.

We were also able to assess the extent to which adjustments to the brand strategy had successfully moved the needle; for example, enabling the brand to achieve its growth potential, or where relevant, mitigating the risks and/ or expand its equity.

Insight

Over two "waves", Cerner Enviza used the Brand Plus Brand Equity solution to provide a clear validation of how the client’s refinements to its strategy were enabling the brand to capture, and even exceed, the growth opportunities identified in the first wave. Our second wave findings also provided evidence that the risks identified in the first wave could translate to actual loss of stated market share if not appropriately addressed.

Impact

The engagement provided our client with a meaningful understanding of their growth potential, a validation of the effectiveness of their brand strategy, and a basis for determining the next steps they should take in order to further grow the therapy class and the competitiveness of their brand.