The Inflation Reduction Act, the rise of artificial intelligence, new healthcare delivery models—you name it, the pharmaceutical industry is constantly facing changing external dynamics that directly impact a brand team’s approach to planning and the path to success.  On top of all that, pharmaceutical marketers face unprecedented pressure to justify and maximize return on investments, while often being asked to do more with less. 

That’s why this year’s brand planning process is particularly critical. In a market where the decisions you make can impact business and health outcomes, there’s very little room for error. It’s why it’s important to approach and evaluate your brand planning efforts through the lens of impact—understanding and quantifying the potential value of your marketing investments BEFORE you spend a single dollar. For pharmaceutical marketers who can’t afford to risk outcomes, there’s no alternative.

We believe successful brands need to take a different approach—one that begins and ends with a focus on impact. By establishing short- and long-term business objectives, identifying and prioritizing key areas of focus and opportunities, and modeling the projected impact of all potential solutions, this approach creates a roadmap that guides your investment decisions and establishes a framework for optimization and go-forward plans.

Through a focused, 3-step process, brands can approach planning with measurable impact in mind.

1. Quantify Opportunities – begin by conducting a comprehensive assessment of marketplace, brand, and customer dynamics to identify and prioritize specific opportunities, and then construct your strategy by quantifying the potential impact of those opportunities. Successful teams then ensure they have the data, resources and partners to help drive impact now and into the future.
2. Enable Change – by developing a clear playbook that guides agencies and partners, teams make their strategic approach actionable and measurable. This playbook outlines key strategic and investment guardrails that ladder back to driving the highest in-market profitability while ensuring the plan is executed with precision.
3. Scale Outcomes – brands can then accurately project impact and review performance to assess tangible results, to determine scale potential for increasing investments and return, and to plan for growth based on successes and evolving opportunities. A customized measurement and learning plan, based on the ever-changing technology and data landscape, ensures focus on the most important KPIs so you can optimize your investment decisions ahead of future spend.

In the past, brands and their agency partners have rushed to brainstorm tactics en-masse, guided by broad objectives and budget parameters. As they make decisions based on “what’s worked,” “what our competition is doing,” and a desire to introduce “innovative solutions,” teams typically evaluate ideas based on their alignment to strategic imperatives rather than on their ability to deliver quantifiable return to the business. Be honest, when’s the last time your agency projected the return on their proposed investment in a new creative campaign?

While exercises like this result in a plethora of possible solutions, they often aren’t evaluated and prioritized based on their ability to drive impact. In a market where past performance is not indicative of future success, brand marketers can no longer operate in this manner.

In pharma, risk is a constant, but that doesn’t mean you need to accept it as a pharma marketer—especially when you have a proven way to mitigate it via a focused approach to delivering impact. The rigor of the approach not only reduces risk, it provides a bulletproof, data-driven rationale for the decisions that underlie your marketing plan and increases confidence that it will work.

The road to success starts with impact. Let’s hit it together.

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