Bridging the Gap: From “Locked in the ’90s” to Dynamic Commercial Strategy.

Debashish Bhattacharya

Pharma brand planning is stuck in the ’90s—bloated decks, static spreadsheets, and siloed data that stall agility and waste resources. To win today, teams need a shift to connected, dynamic, data-driven planning that keeps pace with the market.

A persistent challenge in the pharmaceutical industry is the reliance on traditional brand planning methods that often feel “locked in the ’90s”. These methods typically involve creating hundreds of pages of static slide presentations and spreadsheets. Once these extensive documents are completed, often after a “seasonal effect” of intense effort, they are frequently “put in the drawer” for the rest of the year, hindering agile responses to market changes. This results in a “communication nightmare,” with multiple versions of brand plans circulating, making version control nearly impossible.

Highly skilled brand teams dedicate weeks to this process, yet the resulting strategy often becomes static after launch, failing to reflect real-market scenarios and rarely being used to improve brand performance throughout the year. This phenomenon has been likened to trying to run a 100-metre sprint in “worn-out shoes” – comfortable for walking in the park, but ill-suited for the accelerating speed of competition in the industry. To counter this, a fundamental shift is required, moving beyond outdated methods towards a more unified, agile, and data-driven ecosystem.

Here’s how technology and strategic re-evaluation can empower pharmaceutical companies:

• Embracing Cloud-Based Systems for a Single Source of Truth The manual methods of the past lead to conflicting files and “orphaned data”. Modern solutions advocate for housing brand plans and critical commercial data in cloud-based systems. This establishes a “single version of truth” that is accessible to all team members globally and locally in real-time. Such a database structure allows for easy interrogation, aggregation, and reporting of data, enabling teams to learn from each other and continuously improve. This is a significant leap from the “closed templates” and disconnected information of traditional approaches.

• Integrating Disconnected Processes and Data Pharmaceutical companies often suffer from fragmented processes where launch excellence, brand planning, early commercialisation, and in-market activities operate as independent silos. Even medical and brand plans, which should be aligned, are frequently disconnected. The solution is to create a unified control plane that seamlessly integrates these processes and data sets. Platforms like Enavia, for example, are designed with interconnected modules for Brand Planning, Medical Strategy, Launch Navigation, and Sales Force Excellence. This means that data collected for a launch plan can directly inform the brand plan, eliminating the need for manual data copying and ensuring consistency across functions. This approach leads to “streamlined processes” and “cross-functional alignment”.

• Fostering Global-to-Local Alignment and Support – a major challenge in drug launches is the disconnect between global strategy and local execution. While global teams might create comprehensive roadmaps, successful execution depends on ongoing support and real-time collaboration with country teams, as products are always launched in specific countries. Cloud-based platforms can facilitate this by allowing global teams to monitor local activities and offer targeted interventions, moving beyond merely sending an Excel file with a “good luck” message. This collaboration is crucial for bridging the gap and ensuring that local teams have the resources and insights to succeed.
• Leveraging Data and AI for Dynamic Strategy Development Traditional commercial planning often relies on “anecdotal evidence” and manual analyses. The increasing volume of healthcare data demands effective management and utilisation. With Enavia, archives and current processes of pharmaceuticals companies can be transformed into structured, trustworthy and contextual data architechture which then would enable AI interrogation at scale.
• This allows for data-driven insights for competitive analysis, patient journey mapping, and PEST analysis, transforming them from tedious manual tasks into automated, continuously updated processes. Specific tools within Enavia include:
• • Patient Flow / Patient Journey: Essential for understanding the path patients take through the healthcare system, including decision points, stakeholders, motivations, and jobs-to-be-done at each stage.
• • Relative Competitive Analysis: Helps marketing and market research teams evaluate brand competitiveness, automate SWOT analysis, and identify triggers to move pivotal leverage points.
• • Timeline Dynamics: Replaces the traditional PEST analysis with a virtual market landscape view, connected to external data sources like clinicaltrials.gov, dynamically updating information.
• • Segmentation Tool: Assists teams in defining the right segmentation to focus efforts on key stakeholders. This capability means brand strategies can remain dynamic and responsive to real-market scenarios throughout the product’s lifecycle, rather than becoming static after launch.
• Boosting Resource Efficiency and ROI – The manual, seasonal approach to brand planning is a “huge resource expenditure” for highly skilled brand teams. By automating tasks, reducing errors, and improving cross-functional alignment, digital platforms can deliver significant ROI.
• Even a conservative estimate suggests improvements (e.g., 10% cost reduction and 5% revenue uplift) could yield at least 20-25% savings on overall launch costs. This efficiency allows teams to achieve more with less, freeing up resources for more strategic activities and enabling faster market penetration.
• A 2021 report from PwC indicated that 80% of European pharmaceutical executives found their current brand planning approaches “not fit for purpose,” highlighting the potential for improvement in efficiency and organisation.
• By embracing these technological and organisational shifts, pharmaceutical companies can transition from a reactive, fragmented past to a proactive, integrated, and data-powered future, ensuring more successful drug launches and sustained market leadership. However, it’s important to remember that digital transformation is “20% digital and 80% transformation”, meaning establishing the right internal structures and managing change effectively are paramount for success.