Life sciences companies are increasingly required to address the management of their portfolios with innovative thinking that may need to challenge established practices. Without the luxury of increased resources, companies must manage the competing pressures of the patent expiration of high revenue generating brands, the need to launch more specialised and niche population medicines and ensuring enough focus is kept on growth phase medicines.
As a result, brands that may have once had much more dedicated, traditional focus on them for longer are now being treated and resourced as mature assets increasingly early in their lifecycle. For these brands there is often an opportunity to make adjustments to activities to ensure maximal value is achieved, if some attention can be focused to better understand the activity mix required to achieve this. Additionally, with the changes in the generics market and updated clinical information on medicines as they mature, there remain many opportunities for incremental value from medicines that are no longer patent protected.
All of this means that wherever the management of mature medicines sits within an organisation, the persons tasked with this need to have a seat at the management table to ensure that the value and opportunities available through optimal management of these medicines is fully understood and taken into account as part of the overall business plan.
Having collaborated on and achieved success with brands requiring careful management appropriate to their lifecycle stage and their overall portfolio position, we reflect on some key areas to focus on for both marketed and non-marketing brands within a portfolio.
1. The portfolio review
Taking a detailed look at the marketed and non-marketed brands within your portfolio is a key initial step with a number of key questions to be asked:
- Do your currently promoted brands need the same resource intensity as in previous years?
- Can an analysis be carried out to understand whether the same and/or more can be achieved by focusing attention exclusively on areas of defined highest opportunity?
- Can resources on currently promoted brands be adjusted to accommodate some time and effort on an opportunity identified from within the non-promoted portfolio?
For non-promoted brands, a systematic approach needs to be taken to portfolio screening to enable the rapid identification of brands for further investigation. In addition to the traditional criteria that have been used around levels of generic competition and changes in standard of care, we would also recommend that you equip yourself with an understanding of:
- The most recent treatment guidelines on the therapy area of interest
- Changes that have occurred to the market size from changes in populations, diagnosis ability, etc
- The impact of newly introduced therapies
2. Updating brand insights and consideration of appropriate tactics
If a brand looks like it has potential for growth/slowed decline with additional investment it is key that quantitative and qualitative insights are updated. This may be a relatively quick exercise for promoted brands but for non-promoted brands, there may be limited organisational memory and a need for a detailed fresh analysis to bring insights up to date. Company sales data, competitor data, epidemiology, etc can all help build a picture of the current market opportunity and the variation in the opportunity across a country or region. Primary research can be carried out at this stage with key customers to understand their current perceptions of the brand, if they would welcome new engagement and their preferred means of engagement. New data on the brand can fly under the radar for both the company and customers, so this is a stage to do a literature review and identify if there is anything new about the brand that could be communicated to customers should renewed promotion commence. For larger global organisations, it can also be useful to seek information from across your markets as in some countries the brand in question may have been more of a focus and fresh information, insights and data may be readily available.
Renewing the promotion of a brand is a very different situation from a new product launch and the tactics considered need to reflect this and the effort to make an impact needs to be fully thought through. Customers may have long established beliefs about the brand which you may want to emphasise or conversely directly challenge. Whilst this can most likely be done without having to engage in detailed discussions on the brand, given customers’ level of experience, emphasising a belief may lend itself to non-personal channels, whereas directly challenging a belief may be difficult without a more tailored engagement. If personal selling is required, it is likely that the areas that individuals need to cover will be large so equipping teams to sell remotely could be important.
3. Business rationale
It is imperative to have a clear objective when changes are made to the management of brands within the portfolio. Objectives can be diverse – trying to move resources in anticipation of patent expiry or another major market event; trying to reduce the speed of decline of a medicine with a very targeted investment; seeking growth for an non-promoted brand due to an environmental change; renewing promotion of a brand in a therapy area where a new asset will soon be introduced as a means of re-engaging with a customer group. The business rationale needs to be carefully captured with the expected performance impact, the timeline, the investment required and the interdependencies with the rest of the portfolio. This allows management to assess the opportunity versus other business priorities, consider available resources and determine how to ensure the right resources are focussed on the initiative to ensure the best chance of success.
Taking the time to fully assess a portfolio can reap highly measurable rewards for life sciences companies. With a careful systematic approach to evaluating growth prospects, a significant return on investment can be achieved in a relatively short timeframe. In the face of increasing complexity for ensuring success of focus and launch brands, utilising internal talent and/or external support to evaluate a portfolio can be a prudent and profitable use of resources.
This article was written by Susan Dillon, Head of Commercial at AstraZeneca UK, and Richard Baderin, Founder of SOL Life Sciences Limited, and edited by PharmaTimes for inclusion as a Web Exclusive on the PharmaTimes website. The views, information, or opinions expressed are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of AstraZeneca or SOL Life Sciences.
