Becoming #1: How Does a Brand Get There & Stay on Top?

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Understanding why one pharmaceutical brand may be more successful than another can help leaders to shape the destiny of their own brands. Propelling a brand to #1 can be a challenge, but understanding the key activities and skills that truly make a difference in the journey to becoming a market leader can mean the difference between the success & failure of a brand.

So how does a brand become number one? Provided below are just three of the steps that were identified in Best Practices’ research on driving a brand to the top.

  1. Develop a Clear Brand Leadership Strategy: Leading companies often utilize a triangulation approach to message delivery, using thought leaders, marketing & their sales force to deliver the appropriate message. Respondents from the benchmarking study reported that greater clinical differentiation can help to increase the size of the audience that will be reached.
  2. Identify & Utilize KOLs: Developing relationships with key opinion leaders is a top activity. The earlier that KOLs are identified, utilized, and evaluated, the better. Organizations that have effectively done this have escalated brands beyond their direct competitors.
  3. Integrate Marketing with Medical Teams: It is essential that marketing teams interact well with medical teams beyond the launch phase of a product. This will keep everyone on the same page & ensure that the messages going out will be coordinated.

Once a brand reaches number one, companies must take the appropriate steps to maintain this success. In order to keep ahead of close competitors, companies often engage in offense and defensive competitive intelligence (CI) activities. Making sure to approach brand and expansion decisions early, strategically and systematically can help to encourage successful brand lifecycle management.

In order to push a brand to #1 and to keep it on top, executives should utilize a balanced mix of clinical & marketing differentiation and sales force effectiveness strategies. There are many steps that are necessary to take in order to achieve & sustain successful pharmaceutical brand leadership. If you want to be a leader, you must move quickly and know your competitors and market inside and out.

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