Drive a perfect launch with inspirational brand… | OxfordSM

​Smart organisations are continuously looking for ways to reduce or eliminate friction and create smooth hand overs and, yet:

• When it comes to creating excellence, many companies separate the disciplines of Marketing Excellence (the fuel for great brand development) and Launch Excellence (the catalyst for joined-up launch deployment);
• Even the best global strategic brand development may not go far enough into activation for local markets to be able to take the outputs and run with them smoothly.

Given some of the trends and opportunities in the Pharma world today there must be ways to address this balance, and ensure that desired therapeutic impact and supportive patient solutions are delivered seamlessly:

• Trends like the need for Local Real-World Evidence to support the value proposition at launch, meaning that local cross-functional teams need to be engaged in the preparation for launch earlier to ensure the right evidence is in place to drive uptake; especially at the critical points in the experience journey.
• Opportunities like innovation to enhance the patient experience, particularly through digital apps and devices. These need to reflect local language, regulatory, GDPR, and technical capability, but, perhaps Global teams can go further in developing the detailed service wrapper so that it delivers well across all markets. And is there more they can do when local partners are needed to activate? Providing guidance, recommendations, or even a global partner so that markets can develop partnerships and deploy the services quickly and with confidence.

One way we see this balance being addressed is that shortly before, during and after launch, agile organisations are ensuring they maximise learning. They are set up to share results in real time, and ensure maximum transparency across markets, within a culture of learning and improvement.

The normal hierarchy of global and local opinion can’t get in the way of objective readings of the feedback and rapid response and change where required.

Local, regional and global teams must collaborate or merge: we’re working with smaller companies that don’t separate these capabilities, and larger companies who are working hard to eliminate the friction that comes with structures required by regulation or scale.

Companies are not only talking about agile, they are acting on it: new ways of working means some are now deploying dedicated launch squads to rapidly take the learning from one launch to the next.

Next, we’ll look at what is required for excellence in Brand Development, before completing this short series, by considering what drives best in class Launch Deployment. Read more about Launch Deployment in Pharma.

If you’d like to talk more about how we can help develop your launch capability, please do get in touch. We’d love to hear from you - sarah.langan@oxfordsm.com.

If you’d like to meet our team, we’re pleased to be at eyeforpharma's Marketing and Customer Innovation Summit 2019 in London on 15th & 16th October. We'd love you to join us.