Strategies for Marketing & Branding for a Pharma Company
Prior to launching the marketing campaign for your newly licensed NCE, it is imperative to conduct team interviews to identify the target audience, knowledge gaps and blind spots from historical marketing campaigns. These interviews could be one-on-one structured or semi-structured conversations. Extended interviewing of consensually selected healthcare payer industry experts with adapted questions could also be performed for refinement and reflection of the internal findings. Focus groups/structured meetings consisting of 5 to 10 team members each from a different target market segment or a cross-section of a value chain could also be conducted to brainstorm a storyline and develop content. As a further refinement strategy, surveys of closed research instrument design will test attitudes and perceptions on both the current pharma product offerings and clearly defined future ones to a selected pool of healthcare payers. The objective here is to check on congruency of the story development with the attitudes and perceptions of payers or more simply put that the communication objective is synchronized with needs of the healthcare payers. Conducting a structured audit on current marketing materials will identify the key elements of a Plan Do Check Act system as well as ensuring that there is a “fair balance” in line with the FDA for the appropriate marketing pieces. Based on the above findings and from evaluation of in-house “STP” – Segmentation, Targeting, Positioning tools, a campaign road map can then be constructed.
For the branding of your drug product, we recommend a Brand Equity Framework: With pharma brands it is important to establish a brand name which communicates not only in synchrony with the payer segment but also with the other 4Ps of healthcare – patient, provider (Drs. & nurses) and pharma (your competitors) thus the brand name holds a 360o balance to its meaning. At the core of our brand equity framework, i3 Consult follows these simple constructs in creating some brand name “candidates” or “variants” to be put forward as design proposals:
- It should be readable and writable – the product name should be simple for people to pronounce and write down
- It should be unique – We will come up with some unique names for your product so that when someone says the name, they mean your product. This will also help in search statistics.
- Our brand name candidates will be short, punchy and memorable as this will make it easier for people to remember your product.
- It should look good written down and sound “cool” to say – We will ensure that your brand name will “jump off the page” and stand out next to all the other boring words around it. When someone says it in a sentence, it should stand out so that everyone around pays attention.
- It should evoke an emotion, a feeling or an idea – The brand name should be emotive and inspiring, it should tie back into what your product or service is, what is the feeling you want people to have when experiencing your product or service, and/or what idea are you trying to get across.
We will follow similar constructs in coming up with suitable tagline variants for the brand as well. The tagline will combine these two elements: the mission of the product or service and the promise of it.
Using the above brand equity framework, design proposals for both logo and tag lines should be shared with internal stakeholders and a consensus decision in line with the communication objective(s) to the healthcare payer, will be reached on the logo and tag line adoption.
For more information on these services contact:
E-mail: i3Consult@i3Consult.com 
Website: www.i3Consult.com
Phone: +33 788 914240