Pharma Competitive Intelligence: Warning Signs of Subpar Intelligence
In the fiercely competitive pharmaceutical landscape, comprehensive and strategic competitive intelligence (CI) is crucial for success. Pharmaceutical companies rely on gaining insights into their rivals’ strategies, pipelines, and operations to maintain a competitive edge. However, gathering and leveraging effective competitive intelligence in the pharma sector is plagued by several issues that must be addressed for optimal decision-making and for maximizing the ROI of pharma CI engagements in pharmaceutical companies.
Some common issues pharmaceutical competitive intelligence (CI) teams face include inconsistencies in competitor intelligence, difficulties deciphering competitors’ strategies, incomplete commercial organizational mapping, gaps in clinical trial intelligence and patient segmentation, siloed intelligence gathering, suboptimal analysis, lack of foresight, inferior earnings call analysis, and lack of coherent intelligence narratives.
1. Inconsistent, contradictory, and disjointed findings
One of the biggest challenges in pharma competitive intelligence is dealing with inconsistent, contradictory, and disjointed findings from various intelligence sources. With multiple companies operating in the same therapeutic areas and conducting numerous clinical trials, it is common to encounter conflicting information regarding drug pipelines, trial outcomes, regulatory statuses, and commercialization timelines. These inconsistencies can arise due to factors such as disparate data sources, incomplete or outdated information, and differences in reporting standards across regions or companies.
Without a multiskilled CI team and robust process for verifying and reconciling these discrepancies, pharma companies may find themselves with an inaccurate or incomplete understanding of their competitors’ activities, leading to flawed strategic decisions and missed opportunities. Resolving these inconsistencies requires implementing rigorous intelligence verification, cross-checking multiple authoritative sources, and reconciling contradictions in the gathered intelligence via deeper secondary or focused primary research.
2. Not deciphering the underlying strategy of competitors
Deciphering the underlying strategies of competitors is a critical aspect of pharma competitive intelligence. However, many companies struggle to gain a comprehensive understanding of their rivals’ strategic moves and positioning.
To truly understand a competitor’s strategy, pharma companies must analyze a multitude of factors, including historical patterns, leadership changes, resource allocation decisions, partnerships and acquisitions, therapy area focus shifts, earning calls and public communications. Without this holistic analysis, companies risk oversimplifying or misinterpreting their competitors’ strategies, leading to suboptimal decision-making and reactive responses to competitors’ moves.
Meticulously identifying that a competitor’s strategy aligns with a particular framework, such as the Ansoff matrix or BCG’s growth style, or that their marketing approach is “push” or “pull” dominated, provides an easy way to help keep competitors’ strategy in mind, however, CI vendors need to be aware of such framework and should be able to decode them while conducting research.
3. Lack of field force and sales force intelligence
Gaining accurate insights into competitors’ field force and sales force structures, sizes, and deployment strategies is a longstanding challenge in pharma competitive intelligence. Field forces are the backbone of pharmaceutical companies’ commercial operations, responsible for promoting products, engaging with healthcare professionals, and driving sales. Without precise intelligence on field force numbers, territories, incentive structures, and targeting strategies, it becomes extremely difficult to gauge a competitor’s commercial strength, market penetration, and overall go-to-market approach.
This lack of visibility can stem from various factors, such as the inherent complexity of field force operations, the dynamic nature of resource allocation, and the reluctance of companies to disclose granular details about their commercial organizations. Relying solely on public data sources or industry estimates often yields incomplete or outdated information, painting an inaccurate picture of a competitor’s true field force capabilities.
4. Lack of patient segmentation and biomarkers
In the era of precision medicine, comprehensive clinical trial intelligence that includes patient segmentation and biomarker insights has become increasingly crucial for pharmaceutical companies. However, many organizations struggle to obtain this level of granular data, hampering their ability to make strategic decisions regarding trial design, true addressable patients, and targeted therapy development.
Similarly, insights into biomarker expression, companion diagnostics usage and their correlation with disease progression, treatment response, and adverse events are invaluable for developing targeted therapies and companion diagnostics. Lack of biomarker intelligence can result in not correctly identifying competitors’ target patients and misinterpretation of trial outcomes.
5. Inadequate commercial and corporate strategy intelligence
Effective competitive intelligence in the pharmaceutical industry requires a holistic understanding of competitors’ commercial operations, marketing strategies, field force deployment, and overarching corporate strategies which are required for bringing an asset to the market and for ensuring ensuing market penetration. However, many organizations struggle to obtain comprehensive and high-quality intelligence across these diverse domains, leading to incomplete or fragmented insights that are often not aligned and hinder effective decision-making.
Perhaps most crucially, a lack of comprehensive corporate strategy intelligence can prevent organizations from fully comprehending their competitors’ long-term vision, strategic priorities, and future focus across various therapeutic areas and markets.
6. Lack of high-quality primary intelligence
Primary research supercharges competitive intelligence; thus, obtaining high-quality primary intelligence is essential for gaining a competitive edge in the pharmaceutical industry. Primary intelligence refers to first-hand information gathered directly from sources close to the action, such as industry insiders, key opinion leaders, healthcare professionals, and customers.
This type of intelligence can provide invaluable insights into competitors’ strategies, operations, and plans that are not readily available from secondary sources or where there is conflicting or outdated intelligence in the secondary sources. A subpar primary research is when one obtains intelligence only from KOLs/PIs and academic sources, but fails to acquire intelligence from competitor company sources.
7. Suboptimal interpretation and analysis of intelligence
Even with comprehensive intelligence-gathering efforts, many competitive intelligence exercises struggle to derive optimal insights and actionable recommendations. Sub-optimal interpretation of intelligence and poor analysis can lead to misunderstandings, flawed assumptions, and poor strategic decisions that can have far-reaching consequences.
Several factors contribute to this challenge, including biases, siloed analyses, lack of diverse perspectives, inadequate strategic frameworks, or excessive bromidic frameworks. A lack of diverse perspectives and expertise within intelligence teams can also limit the depth and breadth of interpretations, leading to blind spots and oversimplified conclusions.
8. Lack of predictive power and ability to foresee competitors
Having predictive capabilities is crucial in the highly competitive pharmaceutical landscape, where anticipating competitors’ future moves can mean the difference between success and failure. However, many organizations find that their competitive intelligence analyses lack the necessary predictive power to accurately foresee their rivals’ activities, hampering their ability to proactively formulate effective countermeasures and strategies.
This lack of foresight can be attributed to several factors, including incomplete or outdated data, overreliance on historical patterns, inadequate analytical frameworks, and a failure to consider external factors and emerging trends that could disrupt the industry. Additionally, many CI teams struggle to adopt advanced analytical techniques and modeling approaches that could enhance their predictive capabilities.
9. Inferior endpoints and statistical analysis
Another critical yet often overlooked aspect of pharmaceutical competitive intelligence, particularly where assets are in clinical development is a lack of appropriate analysis of clinical trial endpoints and statistical methodologies. Many CI teams simply copy and paste results from conference abstracts or other trial disclosures or publications without much understanding of the nuances of the endpoints, the statistical methods employed, and their implications for the trial’s success or failure. As a pharma professional, you are aware that endpoints and statistical analyses are the cornerstone of clinical trial outcomes, shaping regulatory decisions, market positioning, and the overall competitive advantage of a therapeutic asset. Failing to critically evaluate these aspects leads to an incomplete understanding of a competitor’s development strategy and associated impact on you.
10. Inappropriate earnings call analysis
In the global pharmaceutical industry, where companies operate across multiple regions and markets, accurately comparing and benchmarking financial performance can be a significant challenge. One key issue is the inconsistency in reporting standards and currencies used in earnings calls and financial statements.
Many pharmaceutical companies express their financial figures in different currencies, reflecting their geographic footprint and operational presence. Directly comparing earnings numbers without proper currency conversion can lead to distorted assessments and inaccurate competitive benchmarking.
Furthermore, the use of different accounting standards, such as the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) and the United States Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (US GAAP), can result in discrepancies in how financial metrics are calculated and reported. Comparing IFRS and US GAAP numbers at parity, without accounting for these differences, can lead to an apples-to-oranges comparison and flawed interpretations of relative performance. For instance, intelligence on pharma COGS (cost of goods sold) is often marred by these issues.
BiopharmaVantage remedies the above-mentioned issues and makes competitive intelligence a value-added activity. We specialize in providing premium quality competitive intelligence services to pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. If you would like to discuss how we can assist you, then please contact us.