Infographics
They say, "A picture is worth a thousand words". Newristics' visually unique and attention-grabbing infographics do exactly that to help demystify even the most complex information with consummate ease.
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InfographicsThey say, "A picture is worth a thousand words". Newristics' visually unique and attention-grabbing infographics do exactly that to help demystify even the most complex information with consummate ease.
Insights from a large-scale analysis of 6,500+ messages from 34 new drugs launched over the past 5 years
The pressure to meet drug launch forecasts has never been greater than now! In today’s highly competitive pharmaceutical industry, drug launch teams can’t afford the luxury of course corrections during launch and need to get launch messaging right from the start.
What makes launch messaging tick? Newristics analyzed the message story flows of 34 new drugs launched in the past 5 years and extracted insightful, data-backed findings that every launch team can use to optimize their launch messaging.
It’s not surprising that launching a new drug requires optimizing messages that talk to the NOVELTY of the product. However, the meta-analysis shows that communicating novelty in the launch message story flow is a bimodal or fork-in-the-road type decision. Winning brands either go all-in & play up the novelty communication aggressively or don't emphasize newness much & just focus on customer end-benefits/value proposition. Launch drugs that take a middle-of-the-road approach to novelty perform worst – they neither deliver sufficiently on the novelty factor, nor the customer end-benefits.
When making treatment decisions, HCPs and patients can sometimes be influenced by a cognitive bias called Novelty Bias, which makes them choose based on the rule of thumb that “newer is better”. In some disease states and for some drugs, Novelty Bias is very applicable and a great way to make decisions about product adoption. But there are many situations when Novelty Bias leads to bad decisions and HCPs/patients have learned over time that newer cannot always be taken as a proxy for better. In these situations, focusing on the end-benefits of the product rather than newness is a better launch strategy.
Talking about the efficacy of a new drug and using messages to create confidence that it can improve outcomes in the disease is obviously very important.
However, HCPs are humans first and if better outcomes require them to deal with new complications, then the adoption decision is not straightforward. Launch messaging needs to not only deliver against efficacy benefits of the new drug for patients but also address the human/selfish needs of the HCPs, and simplification is a major human need.
Launch brands that make HCPs believe that using the new drug will simplify treatment of the condition in some way perform significantly better on preference. Most of the time, MLR does not allow messages that directly claim a simplification benefit to HCPs, unless the new drug has monitoring or dosing advantages over competitors. However, when launch messages are written in a way that makes physicians imagine easier decision-making in the future due to the new drug, direct claims about simplification are not necessary.
When launch teams have a first-in-class drug or even a novel mechanism of action in an existing class, they are motivated to leverage the MOA competitive advantage in messaging. But talking to your unique MOA in a vacuum is not enough, it has to be contrasted against MOAs of existing/legacy treatments to be truly impactful.
HCPs have more familiarity and comfort with existing MOAs and even when a new drug has a “theoretically better” or disease-modifying type MOA, unknowns about the mechanism of the new drug serve as a barrier to adoption. The more fundamentally new the MOA is, the more HCPs have to challenge their existing mental models about the disease and retrain their brains to think about it differently.
Contrasting the new MOA with legacy MOAs simplifies the work HCPs need to do in their mind and can potentially reduce barriers to adoption. Behavioral science tells us that humans use a cognitive bias called Distinction Bias to compare choices when making decisions and comparing a launch drug’s MOA vs. legacy MOA facilitates the HCP’s use of Distinction Bias.
Launch brands that directly explain how the MOA drives improved efficacy tend to perform significantly better than others, but often MLR does not allow a direct linkage between the two because of lack of in vivo data. When a direct linkage is not approvable, presenting the MOA in a way that allows HCPs/patients to connect the dots on their own can also make a difference. Increasingly, new drugs launch in the same class within months of each other, which means while the first-to-market drug can use language like “first and only” to describe its MOA, all other entrants have to find clever ways to describe their MOA.
Launch brands that find a way to help HCPs conclude on their own that the MOA must be driving the efficacy win even if they are not the first-to-market.
Belief Bias is a cognitive bias that states that humans are much more likely to believe what they can easily imagine in their minds. Writing MOA and efficacy messages that facilitate the “visual imagination” of HCPs can lead to launch success.
Launch brands who purposefully emphasize the most important data and de-emphasize the rest perform significantly better than brands who say it all in their messaging. This effect is most pronounced in disease states where brands have data on many endpoints and where data on the same endpoint can be presented in multiple ways.
Nowadays, launch drugs can have large clinical efficacy datasets because of multiple primary and secondary endpoints, and also data on other patient-reported outcomes. The trials can also be powered to include data cuts on different patient types, which can multiply the amount of efficacy data to be communicated to HCPs. Successful launch brands choose to make tough decisions about what data to use in messaging and what to exclude completely or de-emphasize to the point that it only exists as a backup for rep detailing or objection handling.
Dilution Effect is a cognitive effect that tells us how humans make decisions when too much information is presented to them. Research shows that when a lot is said, the message is diluted, and the reader remembers nothing at all. Dilution Effect is a major barrier to launch messaging success and many launch brands fail to act upon it.
Most launch brands present their efficacy data in a way that just describes what happened in the past during the clinical trial. Winning launch brands present their efficacy data in a way that helps HCPs bridge the gap between results from past clinical trials to hope for future clinical practice.
In many disease states, the types of patients HCPs see in everyday clinical practice are not similar to patients who are typically recruited in trials. Also, the clinical endpoints used in clinical trials are often not used in everyday clinical practice, which makes it difficult for HCPs to intuitively project learnings from trial data to their own practice.
Winning launch brands present their clinical trial data in the context of future hope for HCPs and everyday patients in their practice. Behavioral science research shows that many human decisions are based on cognitive biases that deal with (irrational) hope, like Optimism Bias and Positive Outcome Bias and addressing them in efficacy messaging is critical to launch success.
For inline brands, past meta-analyses have shown that customer-centric messaging performs significantly better than manufacturer-centric messaging, which is mostly expected. However, for launch brands, manufacturer-centric messaging performed as well as customer-centric, which is surprising.
Launch brands who won even though their messaging was predominantly manufacturer-centric had a strong value proposition and used messaging that was intuitively easy to understand. When the messages were simple and the data was compelling, HCPs/patients could easily translate the benefits of the product to them and didn’t need customer-centric language to enhance the messages further. In fact, in many cases, HCPs/patients laddered up the manufacturer-centric data to a more aspirational space in their mind that LMR would ever directly allow.
Better performing launch brands make sure that the most important information in the message story flows and within each message is EASILY FINDABLE. Findability is highest when important data/words are put at the beginning OR the end of messages.
Two principles from neurocognitive science explain how the human brain processes information and manages to find the most important information efficiently – Primacy Effect and Recency Effect. Primacy Effect states that information that comes, in the beginning, gets noticed disproportionately more and becomes the most important information even though it shouldn’t be. Recency Effect has the opposite effect and makes people pay disproportionately more attention to more recent information or information that appears at the end.
Using Primacy and/or Recency effect purposefully in messaging can help HCPs and patients find the information they need to make decisions quickly. If the information is not easy to find, customers are likely to procrastinate their decisions or worse, completely abandon them.
Better performing launch story flows focus less on clinical trial names, protocols, trial design, etc. and more on authoritative entities like the FDA, CDC, NCCN, NIH, ACR, etc. Most launch brands emphasize clinical trial information too much, taking up valuable messaging space in the vis aid, website, etc.
Unless the clinical trial design of a launch drug is a source of competitive advantage, trial information unnecessarily clutters the messaging story flow and adds little upside.
Since HCPs have little or no familiarity with launch brands, including names of “familiar” entities in the messaging can instantly create some credibility and facilitate adoption. Launch brands that used references to disease state associations, government organizations, and other reputable entities had significantly higher preference share.
Increasingly, the success of launching drugs depends on their ability to change entrenched customer behaviors with messaging and other marketing programs. Even when the value proposition of a new drug is obvious, customers still need to change some behaviors to drive adoption.
Research in the field of 3-time Nobel-Prize winning behavioral science has revealed that humans are more likely to change behavior with gentle nudges instead of being told to change behavior. Winning launch brands smartly used nudge-based messaging and “demonstrated” to customers that the benefits of changing behavior far outweighed the risks instead of telling them to change behavior.
Better performing launch brands used messaging to differentiate against the leading competitor in more than ONE way, suggesting that one differentiator has become a price of entry in the highly competitive launch environment in most disease states.
The source of >1 differentiators can come from any combination of MOA, efficacy, dosing, patient type, device design features, etc. Adding a second differentiator led to a 16% increase in preference share for a launch brand & surprisingly the nature/composition of the differentiators was not as important as the number of differentiators.
Better performing launch brands used messaging to differentiate against the leading competitor in more than ONE way, suggesting that one differentiator has become a price of entry in the highly competitive launch environment in most disease states.
The source of >1 differentiators can come from any combination of MOA, efficacy, dosing, patient type, device design features, etc. Adding a second differentiator led to a 16% increase in preference share for a launch brand & surprisingly the nature/composition of the differentiators was not as important as the number of differentiators.
For most inline drugs, messaging to a differentiator that “Product X gives you treatment options” typically adds to the appeal of the brand. However, for launch drugs, emphasizing product flexibility/options in dosing, patient type, etc. has a negative impact on launch messaging.
Evaluating a new drug is already a complicated task for HCPs, and dealing with “options” can complicate HCP decision-making even further and serve as a barrier to building psychological certainty. Launch drug trials are highly dependent on how “certain” HCPs feel that the upside of trying the new drug will be worth the extra effort. If a launch product offers options for dosing, patient type and treatment sequencing, it can make the trial decision unnecessarily complex for HCPs, ultimately leading to procrastination and delay. Unless messaging to options helps contribute to the feeling of certainty for HCPs, it is likely to complicate the launch story flow and may not be worth the complication.
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