IpsosMinute
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Five Steps to Powerful Pharmaceutical Brands
An Ipsos Minute with Elys Roberts,
President and CEO, Ipsos Insight Health
Q: There’s a lot of attention given
to strengthening brands in the
pharmaceutical business lately.
What gives a brand its power?
Elys: Brands with real power have a distinct and
emotionally positive position in doctors’ minds.
When a brand comes to mind and it feels like
a friend, it’s familiar, predictable,
reliable, and it’s going to help
when you need it, that’s a very
powerful position. When a brand
that comes to mind and what
pops is, “Hmm. That will give me
a 1% greater decrease in LDL...,”
that’s not a very powerful hook.
If another product comes along
and it offers a 2% decrease in LDL,
then doctors are going to start
using it. So the power for the brand
comes in building a bond, an emotional relationship, with the consumer. What’s burned in doctors’
minds is close to their hearts, and not just their
rational side.
Once we’ve gotten past those three steps – awareness, familiarity, clarity – then we look at distinctiveness: Is the image of the brand unique or the same
as some other medication or some other brand?
How differentiated are you from your competition?
Is there an attribute or a set of attributes that you
own, such as a performance attribute or a feeling
that is distinctly yours?
‘
Brands with
real power have
a distinct and
emotionally positive
position in
doctors’minds.
Q: How do you measure a brand’s power?
Elys: We have five key measures that we look at
when assessing a brand. First, there’s awareness:
How many people have heard of your brand?
That’s the very first step in a long journey towards
true brand power. The second step is familiarity:
How well do people know your brand? So beyond
awareness, we’re looking at whether there’s an
in-depth understanding or if it’s very superficial.
The third thing we measure is clarity: How consistent are perceptions of your brand? If there’s a lot
of divergence in how people think about your
brand, it can’t be a powerful brand. For a brand
to be truly successful, people have to be clear on
what it’s all about.
’
The final measure – and the key
one, really – is leadership: How well
are you doing on the items that
are really driving choice? Some
attributes are nice to have, but
don’t really drive choice. Other
attributes push physicians to put
their pens to the script pads and
write your brand. Leadership is
how well you are performing on
those key drivers.
Those five things together describe a hierarchy,
and give an excellent diagnostic as to how your
brand is performing and how much power it
has overall.
Q: How do you measure a brand’s
development?
Elys: We start by using a proprietary technique
called the Market Momentum Monitor. It’s a quick
way to look at how well your brand is doing.
Maybe you want to compare across geographies,
whether it be countries or whether it be regions
within a country, or you want to compare how your
product is performing between groups like primary
care versus specialists or key opinion leaders. You
can use it as a summary measure to gauge how
you’re performing and where you’re headed.
The Market Momentum Monitor (MMM) measures
how well your brand is doing on an index scale from
0 to 100. Zero is complete underdevelopment;
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no one knows about your brand, and no one prescribes it for anyone. And 100 would be complete
dominance, which means that everyone is aware
of your brand, everyone prescribes it, and everyone
prescribes it for all their patients of that type.
soon as they get the chance they’re going to
prescribe the champion brand because it comes to
mind in a positive way. The other brand types get
used much, much less frequently; they have much
lower market shares.
MMM measures of breadth of use (the percent of
doctors who are prescribing it) and depth of use
(market share) filtered through awareness. Those
things together generate a summary score to
benchmark how well the brand is performing, and
from there we can track its development.
Q: So you can link brand power
to market share?
Q: What have you learned from the
brands that you’ve studied in this way?
Elys: We’ve studied over 300 brands using this
approach, and there are some brands that really
dominate in their markets and there are others
that just don’t really perform that well, and we
want to understand why. We took the market
power measures – clarity, distinctiveness, leadership, awareness, and familiarity – and segmented
brands on how they did on each measure to
understand the characteristics of dominant brands
versus weaker ones. We found that there are five
different types of brands: (1) Champion brands
that dominate in their markets; (2) Unimportant
Difference brands who are distinct, but their point
of differentiation doesn’t really drive prescribing;
(3) Unfocused brands, which have an inconsistent
image in the market, and their problem is clarity;
(4) Me-too brands, which are clear and well understood but they just don’t have a point of difference; and (5) a small group of Developing brands
that are just at the stage of starting to build
awareness and familiarity.
Those five different types of brands all have very
different market shares. If we look at the breadth
and depth of use, the champion brands are clearly
dominant brands: they have high market penetration and high market share. And doctors have a
strong emotional relationship with these brands.
When they sit in front of a patient with a particular
condition – where it’s medically appropriate – as
Elys: Yes. There’s a clear and direct relationship
between brand power and market share. The
brands with the most powerful positioning – with
the most favorable emotional bond with the
physician – have by far the highest market share.
The correlation is very strong and very clear.
Q: Why do some brands excel and
others fail to meet their potential?
Elys: Brands can fail in a number of different ways.
They can fail by not generating enough awareness
or familiarity. They can fail by not giving physicians
a consistent and clear image, so that everyone
understands what the brand is for. They can fail
by not setting themselves apart. Or ultimately, they
can fail by setting themselves apart, but not on
something that is really important to the physicians. By failing to go beyond simple functional
attributes and creating an emotional relationship
with the brand, ultimately brands will fail to
achieve their potential.
Q: What’s unique about Ipsos Insight?
Elys: Our depth of expertise in branding in the
pharmaceutical market, an area which unfortunately is too often neglected. That, and our
passion for helping brands reach their full potential.
Elys Roberts
Ipsos Insight Health
Contact Elys at
elys.roberts@ipsos-na.com
www.ipsosinsight.com
646.313.6188
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