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In today's pharmaceutical landscape, even clinically superior drugs can falter commercially. Traditional launch strategies often miss the mark, failing to bridge the gap between scientific innovation and market success.
All launch teams have commercialization workflows and strategic frameworks for launch planning already. Yet, more than 70% of drugs still fail to meet launch expectations even though launch teams theoretically have years to prepare.
In order to consistently achieve launch excellence on all the drug launches, pharmaceutical companies need to go beyond the obvious and challenge some of the traditional processes and workflows that no longer work in the industry.
All pharma companies know that launch excellence requires launch teams to:
Apply behavioral science to map out stakeholder motivations and decision-making triggers
Yet, conventional launch planning often operates in silos—clinical, regulatory, commercial— leading to fragmented strategies. Trial designs may lack payer-relevant endpoints, and Target Product Profiles (TPPs) can be technically accurate yet commercially ineffective because they don’t solve unmet needs for HCPs and patients.
Achieving drug launch excellence begins well before regulatory approval. Early-stage readiness demands strategic alignment across design, value creation, and adoption planning. Reverse design thinking—starting with patient and physician needs and building the Target Product Profile (TPP) backward—bridges the gap between clinical data and commercial impact.
In the earlier stages of new product planning, there is little to no market research budget, and most of it is spent on demand forecasting studies and perhaps TPP research. New Product Planning (NPP) teams and even early-stage launch planning teams often rely on select KOL interviews to make very important commercialization decisions that sometimes can't be reversed later.
While KOLs are experts in the disease state, their assessment and predictions of how everyday practicing physicians would adopt a new drug are often projectable to the broader HCP universe.
In other words, KOLs can be good at speaking for themselves but maybe not as good at predicting for other HCPs. Launch planning teams need a more robust, real-world feedback loop system to capture input directly from everyday physicians early in the commercialization process. Conventional primary market research approaches are too slow and costly for this use case. Launch teams need a more efficient customer insights platform that allows them to crosscheck KOL projections with actual physician perspectives and make better-informed decisions.
Differentiating a pharma brand today depends just as much on what surrounds the product as what’s in it. Patient support programs, adherence tools, companion apps, biomarker tests, and wraparound services are now essential—not just nice-to-haves. These efforts do more than support patients; they help drive formulary uptake across IDNs, ACOs, and hospital networks.
Payers are looking beyond efficacy. Their decisions increasingly hinge on cost-effectiveness and how a therapy fits into the total cost of care. Pharma companies can strengthen their value proposition by:
Designing beyond-the-pill programs that demonstrate real-world outcomes
Creating tools that help payers model financial impact ahead of approval
Showing how the product can reduce downstream costs or improve system efficiency
These elements not only support adoption but help accelerate access, giving new launches an edge in competitive or cost-conscious markets.
Every drug launch by definition requires significant behavior change from physicians and patients in order to adopt the new drug. Launch teams need to map in detail behavioral changes needed by customers to adopt their product. Sometimes, only minor behavior changes are necessary for adoption of a launch drug, but that’s rare. Most launch drugs need customers to change long-term foundational behaviors to adopt their drug, which can be very challenging.
Applying behavioral science techniques into market research with the specific purpose of mapping every potential behavioral change and its associated barriers can help define a successful drug launch. Centering the launch planning process around the behavior changes needed will ensure that all launch strategies are driven by these decisions.
Dive deeper into how to improve the effectiveness of drug launch messaging.
Many marketing teams hesitate to select a specific patient type for launch, fearing it might limit the brand’s potential or box in prescriber perception
In reality, the opposite is more true. When launch marketing teams don't specify specific patient types for the HCPs to try their new medication on, they complicate decision making for the physician, thereby delaying the process of adoption and leading to procrastination. They also run the risk of letting physicians use their own judgment to select patient types for their drug, which in many cases ends up being not the best patient type, thereby setting both the physician and the launch brand up for failure.
Many successful launch programs have been able to enter the market late as second or third in the class, but still gain market leadership by carefully selecting and asking for specific patient types.
While pharma companies are embracing AI across their operations, most still treat it as a bolton in launch planning—not the backbone. Launches often rely on legacy processes with limited AI use, missing opportunities to:
Improve speed to market
Reduce costly mid-course corrections
Boost forecast accuracy and readiness
A truly AI-first approachto drug launces enables pharma teams to:
As the go-to-market commercial model continues to shift away from personal promotion to nonpersonal promotion channels, successful launch teams are building digital-first launch strategies to achieve omnichannel excellence from day one and to streamline field and digital marketing activities in perfect sync for every campaign.
Even primary market research solutions like Awareness, Trial, and Usage (ATUs), brand trackers, and message recall studies take a long time and still don't provide a strong signal for issues that could be compromising the success of the launch. Major innovation is needed in this field to collect prescribing data from unconventional sources and even use other surrogate measures beyond prescribing data to get more accurate reads on how the launch is going.
Many of the early problems faced during the launch could be preempted if pharmaceutical companies had a better system to detect signal anomalies during the launch process. This would require a faster, different, and more efficient way of connecting in-market data on launch brands which traditional
market research companies were historically not set up to provide.
A successful pharmaceutical launch is no longer just about regulatory approval and commercialization—it demands a multidimensional strategy. It requires behavioral science driven messaging, stakeholder-centric design thinking, and integrated planning frameworks that align upstream and downstream efforts. Leveraging cross-market competitive intelligence and implementing outcome-linked incentives across teams ensures long-term engagement and accountability.
To learn more about how Newristics empowers pharma brands with behavior-first messaging strategies, visit our Launch Messaging Optimization page, explore our Behavioral Science solutions, or read our insights on how to improve the success rate of drug launches
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Newristics
01 Feb 2024
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