Market your brand like a lawyer
Like many people, I love a good show or book about a criminal case, especially one where a scrappy, underdog attorney wins a challenging case with brilliance and pluck. I saw an old favorite the other day, A Time to Kill, and realized there's some applicability to the way a biotech commercializing a product needs to think about building its marketing plan. Here are a few ways to be more lawyerly in your approach to launch planning.
Marshall all your evidence. There's usually a scene in a legal thriller where the lawyer or lawyers are sitting in a room with a pile of documents and law books, trying to find the right piece of evidence to support their client. It can seem impossible, as if there's just too much information for anyone to get through, but eventually they find just what they need to make their case. In pharma marketing, we also have tons of evidence to sift through: not just your trial data and competitor data, but articles written on novel treatment approaches, surveys on the burden of the disease for patients, claims data and much else. Ultimately, the goal is to gather all the key facts so the marketing team has a clear picture of the brand’s strengths and weaknesses relative to its competitive set, the needs of its potential customers, and the headwinds or tailwinds in the market as a whole that will effect launch trajectory.
Carefully craft your case. Lawyers are well-trained to persuade, and the point of all that evidence is to create the strongest possible argument in defense of their clients. Key to doing so in the healthcare world is to understand the "judge and jury" to whom you're making your case. Often, smaller companies are heavily influenced by experts in their field (their founder might even be one of them) who understand the disease and drug in great depth and have a nuanced appreciation of the science and the data. But the audience who usually matters is the community prescribers and the patients, whose understanding might be much more basic. Marketers may also have to build versions of their "case" for nurses, payers, hospital administrators and other people involved in the decision-making process.
Prepare for curveballs from the other side. In legal thrillers, there's usually a surprise witness or piece of evidence that puts the protagonist's whole case in jeopardy. When launching a drug, those types of surprises come from competitors or even regulators who create new barriers to success. That's why robust scenario planning is so critical. Knowing how to respond if you lose a claim that you were counting on to help differentiate your brand, or if a competitor puts out new long-term outcomes data, is key to staying on track. Good planning also means considering upside surprises, so your team is ready to take advantage of opportunities quickly when they arise.
Know when and how to settle. Though the idea of complete victory is appealing, many cases end up somewhere in the middle: good lawyers understand when a settlement might be better than risking everything on an all-or-nothing decision. This, I think, is an area many pharma marketers perform poorly in. I've seen way too many forecasts where a brand team assumes they will get a huge percentage of the possible business in their indication, not taking into account the headwinds of competitor activity or even inertia. Especially when launching into a market with in-class competitors or an established leader with solid data, realize that you might have to identify a partial win that sets you on the path to greater success later. Is there a patient type that you can help the most? Unapologetically say so, and don't worry about niching the brand. It is far worse to say your product should be used for everyone and have that case picked apart than to make a winning argument for a smaller piece of the market. New brands, especially when being launched by smaller companies, can squander credibility and goodwill easily by over-promising, or by chasing patients who can do as well or better with a competitor's drug. Use your market insights to figure out what you can really win, and go win it.
Unfortunately, both the legal profession and the drug industry have bad reputations with much of the public because they are stereotyped as manipulative and heartless, putting their own goals over societal needs. Yet everyone entangled with the law would want the best lawyer to prove their innocence, and everyone with an illness would want an innovative drug that can help them. The job of a pharma marketer is to make a vigorous yet honest argument for what a drug can do and who it can help, to put it in the hands of as many people who can benefit from it as possible.
I rest my case.