Brand planning is an intense, highly strategic endeavor that involves many stakeholders to shape a plan of next year activity and investments helping a brand to maximize its opportunity in a marketplace. While crucial in today’s highly competitive industry, brand planning is also challenging, messy and often a daunting process for many marketers. But what if it didn’t have to be?
Recently, more than 100 pharma brand and portfolio marketing professionals joined EVERSANA INTOUCH’s annual brand planning event called FUEL, designed to share best practices, inspire ideas and spark new ways of thinking about brands of all sizes. Beginning over a decade ago, FUEL has grown into an EVERSANA INTOUCH’s “holiday” according to Tracy Kossler, SVP and Head of CX, when employees and clients alike look forward to the insights that will help shape their brand’s roadmap and success.
Here’s a recap of the key takeaways from FUEL 2024 that can help you navigate and prepare for your brand plan.
1. Understanding Market Dynamics – Is your brand prepared to succeed with a do more with less mindset?
Our industry has entered into rapid transformation, and that’s not changing. From continued economic uncertainty to loss of exclusivity “patent cliff” anticipating pharma sales to decrease by $120B-$150B in 2028. Budgets are tight, while needs are growing. We’re all experiencing a tremendous amount of pressure that’s forcing us to reevaluate our business and staffing models, as well as how we’re going to succeed. All of these dynamics are converging and now pharma is forced with a mindset to “do more with less.” There are ways companies can forge ahead if they use innovative strategies to futureproof themselves, change the way they operate and make things better for patients.
2. Futureproofing with Innovative Strategies – Are you solving for current and future business challenges through intentional innovation?
Marketers are increasingly focused on addressing four challenges: do more with less, grow sales, innovate and differentiate and improve access and outcomes. We outlined various tangible innovations that can help make a business impact at the brand-level and enterprise-level, and a framework for building composable solutions to deliver real impact including:
- Identify the challenge
- Understand the context
- Build the solutions
We also discussed how we can begin to futureproof ourselves by using AI in brand planning. From accelerating market research at every stage of planning to evaluating creative and detailing history based on real data to identify personas.
3. Optimizing Omnichannel – Is your brand delivering on personalized omnichannel with sprint-to-market success?
A panel of industry experts discussed orchestrating personalized experiences with omnichannel marketing and how to optimize for rapid results. The overarching sentiment was that teams have to deploy and optimize omnichannel marketing faster across their organizations and portfolios. With the rise of AI and other platforms, there needs to be a fundamental shift in how marketers think about omnichannel marketing; that is, less rep-centric and more “true omni.” Learn more from the panel conversation in this blog.
4. Distinct Branding Drives Results – Is your brand leveraging distinctive brand elements to elevate brand awareness, recognition and recall?
Pharma advertising has a branding problem. Paired with data and research, we uncovered three ways that many brands miss the mark to drive results: 1. DTC ads focus on generic activities, 2. HCP campaigns lack cross-channel integration, and 3. DTC and HCP campaigns are rarely integrated. We shared specific examples of brands and ads doing it the right way including AUSTEDO® XR, nextstellis® and SUNLENCA®. With the distinct branding in these examples, assets were built early on in the customer journey and rolled throughout the campaign touchpoints; versioning them across all channels to create familiarity…because people click first on what they know.
EVERSANA INTOUCH helps prepare brand’s today to transform tomorrow with brand planning services. Let us bring the data-driven insights, deep expertise, efficiencies and integrated strategies to shape your brand plan and maximize your business.