Marketing Mix Modeling in Pharma: At the Intersection of Strategic & Executable Insights
By Anup Nair, VP Analytic Consulting – Healthcare, Ipsos MMA
Brand marketing teams today are requiring marketing mix modeling in pharma to produce more than the traditional “ROI” assessments. They are targeting deeper, richer “executable insights at sub-national levels” that can identify and produce incremental and measurable value. The race to capture market share amidst increasing competition and specialization is driving marketers to ask relevant, high value targeted questions from Marketing Mix that help make informed decisions not just at strategic levels but also at the tactical levels, such as at physician tier, or salesforce territory levels.
Marketing Mix Modeling in Pharma Success Criteria
Successfully guiding pharma brand marketing into making informed decisions at the sub-national level requires the following criteria when delivering Marketing Mix projects:
- The marketing mix modeling approach should be flexible enough to provide the key performance metrics at these levels
- Solid and holistic understanding of promotional data and granularities so as to generate executable insights at the sub-national level
- An agile process supporting data ingestion, processing, and validation to make sure that additional sub-national insights are delivered within expected timelines to support pharma brand planning schedules
- Data trends seen across time periods for both personal and non-personal promotions at various levels of granularities (e.g. tier-based call volume trends, shift in point-of-care (POC) partners/POC locations) to be able to draw likely cause and effect hypotheses and support brand planning discussions
Prior to every wave of Marketing Mix insights, Ipsos MMA works with our clients to understand both critical strategic as well as tactical promotional insights client partners are looking for that would enable them to make more informed and financially beneficial decisions.
At Ipsos MMA it is clear that a keen understanding of the critical asks from the pharma brand marketing teams, and upfront alignment of these asks in terms of data availability, granularity and Marketing Mix analytical process, leads to more proactive and beneficial brainstorming and consumption of such insights during brand planning sessions.
Pharma Client Case Study
Ipsos MMA has worked with pharmaceutical companies across a majority of therapy areas in successfully leveraging Marketing Mix models to provide insights and recommendations at sub-national levels. In the below case study, sub-national insights and recommendations were provided to guide personal promotions planning with investment levels of over $200M.
The Challenge
Big pharma was keen to understand the impact of personal promotions by its sales force teams. With newer indications getting launched on a regular basis, there was a lot of realignment of the salesforce. This naturally impacted both the strategy and execution of personal promotion tactics. The client wanted to understand the impact and targeted measuring and assessing it by leveraging Marketing Mix.
The Solution
Ipsos MMA’s industry-leading, standardized and comprehensive Marketing Mix approach in pharma ensured that Marketing Mix insights were delivered at the required granularities. The results were measured, evaluated and validated. Sales teams were in a trusted manner, able to understand the impact of their promotional efforts around Detailing, Samples Distribution, Speaker Programs, Lunch and Learn, etc. in terms of their effectiveness and incremental contribution to sales at indication and physician tier levels.
Marketing Mix insights by physician tiers led to further introspection around promotional saturation or promotional insufficiency by the tactic. For the launch product, the client was able to see physician engagement levels by promotional tactic and identify territories where engagement had to increase.
The Results
Ipsos MMA engaged separately with salesforce teams to review and discuss insights and recommendations from the Marketing Mix models. The granularity and timely delivery of insights enabled sales leadership to review, discuss and use these insights for future promotional planning at major forums such as national sales meetings. The ability to review promotional effectiveness performance at sub-national levels and identify potential contributory factors through deeper analysis enabled sales leadership to make tactical changes including reducing calls to non-targets and increasing speaker program engagement with prescribers in certain territories.
Ipsos MMA’s approach in leveraging Marketing Mix Modelling drove promotional effectiveness at both strategic and tactical levels resulting in over $500M in incremental revenue over 2 years.
Are you struggling with the depth and quality of insights from your Marketing Mix measurement program?
Are your Marketing Mix programs not in sync with your brand planning timelines due to program delays?
Do your brand marketing teams struggle to apply the insights from Marketing Mix?