Are You Targeting the Best Physicians for Your Product Launch?
The launch phase of a new product is one of the most critical components—if not the most critical component—of a product’s life cycle. The ability to maximize the new product as quickly as possible as well as ensure its endurance in the marketplace is largely contingent upon a successful product launch. One of the most important components of a successful product launch is physician segmentation and targeting. Identifying the right physician targets is a unique process that is critical to ensuring that your pharma launch product gets off to a running start. Let’s explore why launch segmentation targeting must go beyond standard segmentation and targeting methodologies for a new product.
Targeting Methodologies for a New Product Launch
Segmenting and targeting the right physicians for a pharma product launch is critical to getting the product out of the gates quickly and achieving fast adoption. Physicians who make the best launch targets are those who are most likely to adopt a new product quickly, meaning those who may be good targets for the launch may not necessarily be good targets once the product has been in the marketplace for six months and vice versa. Thus, launch segmentation and targeting is a process that is unique from any other stage of the product life cycle. Nevertheless, the most common methodologies used to segment and select launch targets are largely the same as some of the most common methodologies used in later stages of the product life cycle: deciling and market share.
Although deciling and market share do provide useful information regarding a physician, they unfortunately only scratch the surface and do not offer commercial intelligence that can be used to determine if a physician would be a good target for a launch product specifically. This is why, in order to be effective, launch segmentation and targeting must go beyond these standard methodologies to more innovative methodologies that achieve a deeper understanding of physicians and why they prescribe the way they do, or what we call we call physician profiling.
What is Physician Profiling?
Physician profiling utilizes a host of standard and behavioral metrics to create dozens of rich physician segments, or what we call physician profiles. Certain physician profiles are more likely to switch to a new product than others, and physicians who fit these profiles are the premier targets for a new product launch. Critical to the methodology are the behavioral metrics—especially TMA’s proprietary behavioral metrics—as they are a stronger indicator than standard metrics of why physicians prescribe the way they do and provide a multifaceted view of physicians.
Consider the following two physician profiles below:
PHYSICIAN A
PHYSICIAN B
Which one of these two profiles is the superior candidate for our targeting efforts for a new product launch?
Conclusion
Physician segmentation and targeting have tremendous ability to ensure that a new product performs as strongly as possible during its critical launch phase. The most effective segmentation and targeting programs for launch products focus on targets identified through physician profiling who will be most likely to adopt the new product quickly. Unlike other life cycle phases, different segmentation and targeting methodologies must be adopted in the product launch stage to ensure the new product gets off to a running start.
