Driving growth for both: One in-market, one next‑gen

The Challenge

The story of our client’s market-leading injectable seemed to have reached its final chapter. Then, a plot twist. New clinical data arrived, rekindling physician and patient interest. Just like that, the mature brand once again took on the bright sheen of novelty.

Meanwhile, our client was also planning to launch a next-gen injectable in the same class—a treatment with strong efficacy and more convenient dosing.

The company’s previous launch experiences loomed large as a cautionary tale. Enormous time, effort and money had often been poured into reaching healthcare professionals (HCPs) and patients, despite the fact that managed care may not have yet put the newly approved therapies on formulary. Ultimately, the company, like many of their competitors, had spent millions only to give their most important and eager customers a bad experience.

The launch of this new, promising diabetes injectable would be different. Our client vowed to spend smart, meet HCPs and patients where they were and appropriately set coverage expectations.

As digital agency of record (DAOR) for both brands, closerlook’s challenge was to communicate the relevance and benefits of the new clinical data for the mature, market-leading injectable while ensuring the next-gen therapy found its way to the patients most appropriate for it—in the geographies where managed care access ensured patients could get it.

The Solution

closerlook and brand marketers developed a strategy to respond promptly and precisely to the new injectable’s ever-changing managed care reality using geotargeting techniques and modular digital campaigns that fit the specific conditions of each local market.

In areas where the new injectable had not been added to formulary immediately after launch—in other words, most geographies—the marketing focus was the new clinical data for the market-leading injectable. An omnichannel disease-state campaign showed why the new clinical data mattered to patients’ health. A branded landing page and interactive article, with engagement driven by display ads, email and paid search, shared the brand’s new clinical data with HCPs with a compelling, patient-centric approach. Sales representatives were armed with digital sales tools and emails they could use to invite their HCP customers to understand the positive implications of the new clinical data for their patients.

In these same geographies, the next-gen injectable was introduced in a “coming soon” context that created awareness and whetted the appetite for effective treatment and greater dosing convenience, without setting HCPs’ expectations that the treatment would immediately enjoy a top-tier formulary position in the geography. HCPs in Coming Soon geographies received communication through multiple digital channels that made them aware of the new injectable and its core features and benefits.

In geographies where strong formulary access for the next-gen injectable was in place shortly after launch, HCPs immediately received personalized messages—via the sales force and through non-personal channels—that reinforced awareness of the new treatment, its benefits and its immediate availability. With awareness in place, HCP marketing efforts in Available Now geographies pivoted quickly to deeply engaging, clinically focused experiences that fostered an urgency to prescribe the new injectable for appropriate patients. The Available Now multichannel campaign also emphasized the wealth of practical support—samples, cost and coverage and patient education—that was available to HCPs and their office staff in order to ensure an excellent initial brand experience. Prescribers of the mature injectable were also made aware of that brand’s new clinical data with a secondary emphasis via digital channels, allowing the field sales force to pour all its efforts into supporting the successful adoption of the new next-gen therapy.

Because of the targeting sophistication and the modular design of the multichannel campaigns, HCPs in the Coming Soon geographies that had been identified as the earliest-of-early adopters—for whom top-tier formulary access was less of a factor—were offered content and experiences similar in depth and breadth to those that the HCPs in the Available Now markets received. Interactive articles and videos encouraged them to envision a more convenient patient experience without sacrificing clinical control.

Whenever the new injectable enjoyed a formulary win, HCPs in those geographies were moved seamlessly from Coming Soon to Available Now communication streams, across multiple channels.

This highly responsive campaign gave HCPs the information most relevant to them as the new therapy’s formulary access evolved in their geographies.

Results

Just when market watchers might have expected it to begin fading away, the mature injectable enjoyed a period of remarkable late-stage growth.

And at the same time, on the strength of its strong clinical profile and a smarter marketing approach well executed, the new injectable achieved blockbuster status less than two years after approval.

The success of the Coming Soon/Available Now marketing strategy and its agile, geo-targeted execution made it a model for the biopharma company’s next launch in the same therapeutic area.