Maximising your brand potential with a business insights limited budget

Over the years the pharmaceutical industry has been known as a “data-driven” industry, and mostly known for clinical studies and outcomes as key for differentiators between types of patient treatments.

To get a clear understanding of a therapy area, to understand the brand potential and to derive strategic decisions within the pharmaceutical companies, are goals also driven by a great amount of data. This has led many pharmaceutical companies to spend an excessive part of their budgets on “market data” only to get, in most cases, limited benefit from it for their brands.

Common practice

In recent years, the different data sources which can provide an understanding of a therapy area have expanded. Some of them, available for free as part of the national health systems data sharing (real-world data) but many others provided at high cost from a limited number of providers.

Regardless of the insights you would want to find out through the data, the vast number of data sources out there can be overwhelming. Their analysis, identification, and effective use get particularly complex. This could result in misinterpretation and attribution to a lack of budget. 

To those people who believe the amount of the budget dedicated to data is directly correlated to the insights and benefit you would get from them, I would like to ask them: “As budgets are normally limited, why not try to maximise the outcomes and insights from what you have got?”.

We can assume you have gone through your brand planning process and have developed the strategy and tactics to ensure achieving brand strategic objectives. These tactics would have been drawn upon current market intel and the remaining unanswered questions would need to be researched (qualitatively or/and quantitatively). Would it be as straight forward and simple as it sounds? Would those answers be what the brand team require to ensure key objectives are met? The obvious answer is NO. 

Most likely it would not even be a third of the information that you would end up analysing, developing and producing during the year. However, it might be that for different reasons questions got diverted (off-strategy) and some questions remain unanswered at the end of the year having spent all budget and on occasions gone over budget. 

In many cases, the reason for this situation has nothing to do with a wrong strategy but with a misalignment on what the key questions to be answered are and how to go about finding that information.

Having small analytics and insights budget is not unusual but it is certainly relevant on how you must proactively find a way to understand the market.

Using budget effectively

Firstly, it is important to see your budget not as a limitation on what you can achieve or find out, but as guidance on how you will spend it effectively maximising the outcomes.

You can start by dividing your budget into three sections:

• To answer key market questions
• To answer unknown questions (ones you don’t know you have yet) 
• To innovate (data/methods/presentation/visualisation) 

Secondly, you can assign different weights to each of these sections depending on brand needs. Although always keeping the highest weight (%) “to innovate”, you must ask yourself, why is that? The simple answer is that every insight you will produce would not resonate or help the brand team if it cannot be disseminated effectively. Finding a “new or different way” (for the team) to do this MUST be your priority. 

Last but not least, the identification of key market questions and unknown questions must only be researched if aligned with brand strategy to avoid budget and time-wasting. 

Taking further steps

Once you have identified key questions, the how, where and when to get the answers can be the most difficult part of the job. There are two main constraints to accomplish this: time spent on analysis and data knowledge.

The time you spend on deeply analysing data would depend on your business needs at that particular moment. It might be that you do not have the time to look for further insights from that particular data source, nor correlate it or cross it with other data sources to identify new insights.

Healthcare real-world data is generated every second and as we move towards a more digital era in this sector, more and more data is available to the public which is challenging to keep up with all of it. Furthermore, when relevant data is identified, it is not easy to fully understand how to use it effectively. 

The skills to understand what the data means for the market or brand under study, the knowledge of the therapy area and a regular update on new data sources and digital health developments are the keys for maximising the outcomes of data sources purchased. However, who says you have to purchase data for every unanswered question that the brand team may have? 

A few helpful steps to take before you decide to purchase/conduct a project are the following: 

Conduct a detailed analysis of data/ information you need to answer key questions (aligned to brand strategy).
Undertake a detailed review of current data sources to understand if any of this can be helpful.
Research into free relevant data sources (Real World Data).
List available methodologies and options to extract or produce the data/ information.

You want to make sure these steps are undertaken by at least two members of the team; another non-critical but constructive pair of eyes always helps to think out of the box and take different approaches. 

If you do not have the time to analyse the available data or do not understand it very well and opt for purchasing it (partially analysed data option). The question is: how do you limit the spend and use the data effectively?

• Request a data sample or usage trial (to make sure data meets our needs).
• Make a long list of all the data points & insights you could draw from data purchased (think out of the box and do not limit yourself).
• Use current data sources to cross-reference to new “purchased” info (find a common data point to link it and understand it further).
• Do not purchase two different data sources to find out the same information (very likely to create confusion showing different outcomes).
• Avoid having the same study with the same objectives and same methodology for more than 12 months (the market is dynamic and so your analysis must be).
• Utilise innovative methods to generate real “insights”.

Innovating to generate insights

Getting the most needed information after having spent significant budget or conducting advanced analysis is not enough for your brand to stand out or become market leaders. The “innovation” section from your budget to generate “new” insights is KEY for effective data usage. 

Once you have got all this information which you have been identifying and analysing, the next step is not drawing conclusions from it. The final step is to generate “new insights” from it. An actual insight could lead your brand to generate a truly competitive advantage which could resume into more patients treated and more revenue for the company. The inclusion of members of the brand team is important to fully utilise the key information you have got and translate it into insights.

Final thoughts

The common constraints to identify your brand potential and maximise the outcomes such as low budget, limited time and relevant skills must be written off the table. These cannot longer be constraints when you identify the right question to research and data source, find an innovative method to put it across to the brand team and work as a team to generate insights from it.  

This is not an easy process but brief expert guidance on this could help you and your team to get there. If you would like to know more about the Generating Insights process. Please visit https://www.anaperez-consulting.co.uk or contact Ana Perez ana@andersen-perez.com.