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Leveraging Physician Segmentation to Develop Brand Strategy
Putnam Associates reports on how brand team leaders can obtain more from physician segmentation
March 23, 2009 -- Putnam Associates, a Boston-based strategy consulting firm advising the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries globally, released today an Inflection Point™ on how pharmaceutical managers should reconceptualize physician segmentation to address a wider range of brand strategy and opportunity questions.
A typical brand team’s approach to segmentation involves building a data set about doctors of interest through primary research (often focusing on high prescribers) and conducting exploratory data mining in search of insight. Putnam’s belief is that framing segmentation primarily as a sales force-oriented, message refinement exercise, and executing segmentation through an explore-the-data approach, prevents many franchises from leveraging the strategic power of segmentation. This narrow focus is a significant reason why brand teams often find physician segmentation unsatisfactory.
As an alternative, Putnam Associates has developed a methodology called Objective-Driven Segmentation, which is distinguished by 1) its focus on analyzing segments in the context of a clear overarching market picture and 2) an emphasis on the practical application of findings to guide brand strategy.
The case study describes the approach Putnam took with a client brand team at a leading pharmaceutical company which markets a drug considered the gold standard for a chronic disease treated by specialty physicians. The client was seeking to understand why the drug was falling short of initial sales projections.
At the start of the project, the client believed the key imperative was to increase new patient acquisition. Putnam Associates supplemented this hypothesis with others, based on preliminary analysis of third-party prescribing data, which showed that addressing particular issues with adherence, particularly given the condition treated, could be at least as large an opportunity as new patient acquisition. Because better adherence would maximize the value of any new patient acquisition initiatives, it was worth analyzing whether adherence should be addressed first.
In order to further analyze challenges and relative opportunities, Putnam built "deep dive" modules on particular elements of prescribing mechanics, adherence, and patient counseling on side effects into a quantitative physician survey.
The overall analysis generated several strategic insights. First, the client was pursuing a new patient strategy with a segment of physicians that was already tapped out; instead the opportunity in this segment of doctors was clearly to improve patient compliance and persistency.
Secondly, there was in fact a new patient opportunity, but it existed in a different segment of physicians. Overall, the focus of the sales force on the highest-prescribing physicians had contributed to a breakdown in the client’s ability to educate additional doctors about the therapy — and those lower-prescribing — or non-prescribing — physicians, in the aggregate, were treating a significant majority of the untreated appropriate patients. The analysis revealed enough characteristics of these low-prescribing doctors and practices that reps could effectively identify these practices.
The client leveraged Putnam’s work to take a number of action steps. For example, subsequent outreach to doctors, nurses, and nurse practitioners in one segment of practices emphasized a different approach to discussing diagnostics, monitoring adherence, and counseling patients on coping with side effects. A pilot program would later find that this different approach resulted in a 17% higher Rx volume in those practices after just a few months than in a control group — driven largely by significantly better patient adherence.
"Putnam’s Objective-Driven Segmentation approach develops a detailed understanding of patient treatment paths, works from hypotheses about possible opportunities or initiatives using the segmentation exercise to test hypotheses, and ensures the segmentation fits with the real market landscape," notes Domenick Bertelli, Partner at Putnam Associates. "Our emphasis on the practical application of findings to guide brand strategy has worked well for our clients."
To download a copy of "Leveraging Physician Segmentation to Develop Brand Strategy," visit http://www.putassoc.com/company/pub_physiciansegmentation.html
For more information contact Domenick Bertelli, at 781.273.5480 or dbertelli@putassoc.com
Putnam Associates (www.putassoc.com) is a strategy consulting firm headquartered in Boston, founded in 1988, and serving the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, diagnostics, and medical device industries on a global basis. Two decades of experience and focus in their industries enable them to create significant value for their clients. Creative and disciplined strategy development processes blend with deep market knowledge for one purpose: to help their clients succeed. The company’s leadership includes: Kevin J. Gorman, Managing Partner (BA, Boston College; MBA, Harvard Business School); Richard J. Tinsley, Partner (BA, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania; MA, Stanford University; MBA, Stanford University); John A. Gordon, Partner (BA, summa cum laude, Tufts University; MBA, Harvard Business School); Eric C. Auger, Partner (BA, Providence College; MA, Boston University); and Domenick Bertelli, Partner (AB, Harvard University; MBA, MIT Sloan School of Management).