• by Les Luchter , 6 hours ago

 What's the role of the marketing department as a pharma product moves through the process of development up to launch?

That was a major topic during a recent Beghou Consulting webinar.

As pharma companies prepare for a new product’s launch, the marketing team reigns as “captain of the ship” from about two years to one year out, Amit Grover, assistant vice president, commercial excellence, for oncology-focused Stemline Therapeutics,  said.

At that time, the marketing team is “preparing things, market research is happening,” Grover said, with marketing also handling such essentials as “data readouts, potential options, the competitive landscape.”

For about a year before then, during the development stage. Grover explained, “marketing is there,” but the company's medical team is “the conductor,” with a big role also played by regulatory.

Then, towards the launch, “it’s all hands on deck,” and post-launch sales becomes “captain of the ship,” with marketing “playing a supporting role.”

The marketing team plays a large role pre-launch in coming up with a “shared vision” for a new product, noted Hasini Jayatilaka, Gilead’s  associate director, oncology – global commercial strategy and operations.

“As we see the data come through, as we see how our competitors are positioning themselves, whether it's to defend their market position or launch another new product that we may be competing with, we have to be agile in how we change our strategy and move forward,” Jayatilaka said. “Sometimes that involves out-of-the box thinking in how we decide to position our therapeutic or our diagnostic to make sure that we get to the right patients at the right time.”

“At the center of our strategy when it comes to launch,” Jayatilaka stressed, “we need to think about the patient and be very patient-centric.”

 “Things have evolved so quickly in engaging with people on meta, Instagram, TikTok,” Grover pointed out, “making more patient ambassadors to share their experience. People are more open to sharing. They want to make sure they are able to change that paradigm of what involvement they want in decision-making. Our marketing teams are really collaborating with patients and organizations to enable that.”

While big pharma firms like Eli Lilly use the term “customer-centric,” Grover said, when it comes to rare diseases, which Stemline focuses on, “customer-centric is a very rare term. We always use ‘patient-centric.’”

But, according to Beghou Consulting research, “patient centricity remains a goal, not a system,” with only 11% of study respondents listing patient-centric programs and support as “top factors for commercialization success.”

In the study, titled “What’s Working, What’s Not, and What’s Next – Learnings from 140 Industry Leaders,” only one out of five pharma marketers or heathcare providers said they “use the patient journey to anchor customer engagement planning.”

 While “personalization and patient-informed tactics are advancing” when it comes to  “brand orchestration,” Beghou found that “omnichannel execution still runs on separate tracks — not in sync with how people actually behave.”