Debashish Bhattacharya
Daniel Kohlstaedt, managing director at PurpleLeaf Strategy, discusses how new technologies can help pharmaceutical leaders plan for success during their upcoming brand planning cycle.
It’s that time of year again: 2024 brand planning is underway. Brand managers across global and local teams are hard at work developing strategies to position their products for success and maximise their market impact.
During this process, brand teams must closely assess data on the many market levers that can bolster or detract from their brand. In the past, teams had to manage data manually. Today, brand teams can benefit from technology platform offerings that aggregate data and automate these analyses, helping unlock insights on the market landscape and clinical environment that they can use to maximise their brand’s reach.
Understanding common brand planning challenges
Today’s technologies are a marked improvement from the manual processes used for brand planning in the past. Traditionally, brand teams stored plans and important data in static documents like PowerPoint decks or spreadsheets. This led to a variety of version control issues once plans cascaded from global to local teams.
For example, let’s say one brand team member uploaded new data on their product’s market performance to a spreadsheet saved to their drive. They planned to email that spreadsheet to their colleagues later in the week, but in the meantime other team members input their own data into a different version of the document. By the time the first brand team member distributed their version of the spreadsheet, there were multiple versions of the brand data file stored across the team’s server. Over time, it becomes increasingly difficult to tell which version is the latest and most complete to use when developing a brand strategy – and team members may not always be aware of the latest data.
In addition, information may get lost in static templates. Teams may not have easy access to last year’s brand plan PowerPoint, meaning they miss out on applying learnings from last year to this year’s brand plan.
Not to mention that static brand planning processes mean global teams may not have a clean, easy-to-grasp view of local efforts. Different local affiliates may use different templates to capture their brand planning data. This lack of standardisation can create challenges when global teams want to measure progress and plan resource allocation for the future.
Brand planning platforms support the full range of brand teams’ needs
Today, the right brand planning platform can streamline all brand planning data and functionalities into one cloud-based system. This efficiently links all parts of the business through their brand planning efforts, and it enables easy information sharing with relevant colleagues to facilitate collaboration.
Rather than managing multiple files and carefully tracking document version histories, a brand planning platform suite can enable all brand colleagues to work from a single source of truth, which is constantly updated with the latest data.
Crucially, this also helps to create global to local consistency. With access to the same, centralised information, teams around the world can successfully implement global plans at a local level. Once plans have gone into action with the affiliates, local teams can then share results with global leadership via the cloud-based platform. This eliminates the need for different reporting templates. Instead, local teams can input data in a uniform format, then data is aggregated into dashboard views that enable rapid visualisation of the brand’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to progress. This speeds time to insight at the global level, empowering global leaders to allocate resources effectively and efficiently.
Enhance brand planning with technology tools
In addition to the broad functionalities of brand planning software, individual brand planning tools use data and analytic technologies to deepen insights, thus improving strategic decision-making.
For example, a specific tool that provides a deeper view into the competitive landscape can help a brand team understand how they measure up against others in their market. Powered by cloud-based, data-driven analytics, teams can use these insights to pinpoint their leverage points and allocate resources where they can have the greatest impact.
In addition, well equipped brand planning platforms have specific modules to support PEST analyses. These tools automatically and continuously aggregate data from multiple sources – ranging from proprietary data to information public on ClinicalTrials.gov. With the latest data on all of the political, economic, social, and technological factors that could impact your brand’s market position in one place and organised into dashboards, teams can easily assess how their brand’s performance evolves over time – then use this information to guide strategic decisions during brand planning.
Finally, another key functionality helps to unlock information about patient journeys. Data can help reveal the motivations for clinical action at different stages of care, and how interventions impact health outcomes. These patient insights help strengthen brand strategies.
It’s especially useful when these types of brand planning software functionalities are packaged individually, meaning a team doesn’t need to invest in a full platform if they don’t need it.
Leverage data and technology effectively to strengthen 2024 brand planning
Brand planning is a complex effort that involves many teams, countless individuals, and vast amounts of market data. Having spent nearly two decades building and supporting brand strategies, I’ve experienced these challenges first-hand. But by deploying the right software platforms across the brand organisation, teams can effectively leverage data and technology to optimise brand impact.
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Explore deeper insights on How New Technologies Help Keep Brand Planning Simple in our next article.