Leveraging Path-to-Market Competitive Intelligence for Pharma Commercialization and Competitive Advantage
Pharmaceutical Path-to-Market Competitive Intelligence is insights collection and generation across an asset’s journey towards markets. Competitive Intelligence (CI) is a commonly used tool in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry. CI has numerous applications and provides insights and foresight, which help companies make optimal decisions. One of the prevalent practices in the industry is to use dashboards for monitoring competitors and their activities – e.g. a radar plot showing various developmental stages of compounds along with segmentation by the mode of action.
From a strategic point of view, this is a cross-sectional analysis. Similar to the balance sheet of a company, dashboards provide a snapshot of the status of the play. Several organizations and their decision-makers augment the dashboard by combining it with intelligence gathering across the value chain, i.e., Path-to-Market Competitive Intelligence (PTM CI). Under this practice, intelligence is gathered from all those areas through which an asset traverses in order to reach the market. Pharmaceutical Path-to-Market competitive intelligence helps to optimize every element of the commercialization strategy. Some of the elements of the Path-to-Market competitive intelligence are described below and learn more about how to maximize ROI of pharma competitive intelligence engagements.
Commercialization
This addresses the overarching strategy on how the competitor plans to commercialize its assets allowing one to understand their resources/capabilities and constraints. This is specifically important for competitors who are small or emerging companies but are disruptive. Privately or venture capital-funded pharma and biotech companies are good examples. This would also include companies which are listed on small stock exchanges or those that have smaller market capitalization.
Clinical
Next, in the Pharmaceutical Path-to-Market competitive intelligence, come insights from the clinical domain. Competitive intelligence from the clinical facet allows a player to understand the true addressable patient segments, patient stratification strategy, clinical differentiation and expected timeline for achieving milestones. Often these parameters dictate the subsequent marketing strategies.
Regulatory
Intelligence from regulatory areas helps to seek what sort of regulatory strategies competitors are adopting to aid or expedite asset development and enforce exclusivity. With respect to the former, it could be priority review, fast track, etc with the FDA while for the latter, it could be orphan drug designation and so on.
Manufacturing
Manufacturing intelligence is often bundled with regulatory intelligence, however, segregated assessments of the ability to manufacture and supply are relevant for several classes of assets such as those which have complex manufacturing processes including gene therapy, cell therapy, complex generics, biosimilars etc. Intelligence on the cost of goods sold aka COGS is often sought- learn more about pharma COGS intelligence here.
Pricing and Reimbursement
Nothing is more topical than pharmaceutical pricing and reimbursement. There would not be a day where news does not cover that ‘PharmaCo ABC drug has been rejected by NICE’ or ‘ICER thinks that the cost of XX disease gene therapy should be $200K’ etc. Path-to-Market competitive intelligence covering pricing and reimbursement seeks to understand questions such as inter alia, what economics arguments the competitor is going to make to payors, what is the planned pricing strategy for the asset etc.
Marketing
Pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies spend a significant amount of resources on marketing. In general, the SGA margin is significantly higher than the R&D margin of a typically large and established player in the industry, which suggests how paramount is marketing in the pharmaceutical sector. Path-to-Market competitive intelligence covering marketing seeks to provide insights on questions such as how the company plans to position its assets, what are the messages to prescribers, what are the key events where they are shaping/influencing KOLs etc.
Field force and Salesforce
Field forces are the front-end of marketing supporting the asset. Out of the SGA expenses of the pharmaceutical industry, the salesforce constitutes a material fraction. Path-to-Market competitive intelligence in this domain seeks to understand the structure of the medical and salesforce organization, their number and deployment. Read more about field force and salesforce competitive intelligence here.
BiopharmaVantage is a specialist consulting firm that provides premium quality competitive intelligence services to pharmaceutical companies. If you would like to explore how we can assist you, then please contact us.