M's the word: Is buy-one-get-one-free the best we can do?
What pharma marketing needs now is an emotionally uplifting campaign that will explode onto the primary care scene
By on Oct 5, 2010We were talking about business. As usual, I made a statement about the industry based on no evidence at all.
I remember having a really difficult time driving sales with a low-potency topical steroid.
I told my manager that we should discount our topical steroid in hospital.
Dermatologists would start to use it because it was cheaper and different from the product the patients were taking when they arrived in his clinic.
Further, each prescription generated by a dermatologist would be turned into six when the script got back to the GP.
I had absolutely no data to support this, but it turned into folklore, then fact and it has a sort of smack of truth.
So this time, my comment was that pharmaceuticals in primary care are dead.
I asked my learned colleague what was the last primary care launch he could recall, and he was stuck.
I built on my advantage, with a tirade on the number of primary care products that are losing exclusivity in the coming three years, Lipitor and Diovan being the first two I could think of.
Unless the follower compounds are well differentiated, they will lose share when the leader goes generic.
So your period of exclusivity is not linked to your patent, but to the shortest patent of your competitive set.
If you scan the wire services, all the discussion topics are about secondary or tertiary care product launches for orphan diseases or micro-sliced market segmentsmore accurately, slivers, where a population can be defined either by desperation or resistance to conventional treatment and an emotional pitch can be made for a high price, which will turn a small volume product into a billion dollars.
Treatment-resistant gout, pulmonary hypertension, restless leg syndrome, muscular dystrophy, multiple sclerosis, resistant hypertension ... You get the picture.
So is this the panacea for a pharmaceutical companys health? I think not. It is a get out for lazy marketers.
You hope you can fly below the radar for long enough to get onto the market, scoop the pool, and have inertia on your side to defend your pile when competitors arrive.
Let me show you what I mean.
No one would deny that beta interferon was a breakthrough for multiple sclerosis.
It has moved the specter of the wheelchair back by at least 10 years.
But as a delegate at an MS congress last year, I was depressed to see drugs differentiate on the basis of the thickness of the needle.
I suppose you could say that the beta interferons have lived their life and should now give way to other drugs.
Perhaps I should consider this to be a masterful way of extending life for these great products.
But whatever, it does not give me much hope for the science (or art?) of marketing.
I hope someone out there is working on a potential launch for a major disease and preparing a good, well thought through campaign that will explode onto the primary care market, complete with poster child graphics and an emotionally uplifting story.
Easy to do for cancer, but surely not beyond the wit of man to do for osteoarthritis or depression.
Because without that sort of excitement, we will not change the landscape, we will not lift our image.
We are doomed to BOGOF (Buy One Get One Free) as I was in my early days in marketing.