Customer-Driven Positioning:
The Next Generation Approach to Pharmaceutical Product Positioning

According to the seminal work, Positioning, by Al Ries and Jack Trout, “positioning is where the company wants its product to be placed in the customer’s mind so that it will achieve optimal utilization.” Positioning is the fundamental basis for brand marketing strategy; it is the foundation of marketing a product, an internal statement of purpose that informs and drives the development of all subsequent marketing communications. But establishing the pharmaceutical brand position – the advantageous location that a product owns in the minds of physicians – is one of the most challenging components of marketing campaign development.

One reason the task is so difficult is that when using traditional marketing research methodologies to develop position statements, brand teams expose study respondents (physicians) to fully formed messages that mingle clinical and emotional benefits with “aspirational” claims, often incorporating idealistic utilization demands, e.g., use us first-line. The problem here is that physicians are unable to unravel, and thus understand and appreciate, the meaning of these complex messages and often reject them due to a weak link.

While this process has been used for years, it is clearly driven by the pharmaceutical company and not the customer. An alternative approach, which more closely reflects the process by which physicians truly want to engage and learn about a new pharmaceutical product, is called Customer-Driven Positioning (CDP).

In a recent Journal of Medical Marketing article titled, Customer-Driven Positioning: The Next Generation Approach to Pharmaceutical Product Positioning, GfK V2 CEO Richard B. Vanderveer, Ph.D., and GfK V2 Executive Vice President Noah M. Pines demonstrate how CDP uses a bottom-up process that allows respondents to build the positioning statement themselves. The primary steps in this process are described briefly below:

• Pre-positioning research is conducted to establish key elements that advantageously distinguish a brand from its competitors.
  
  
• The brand team holds an extensive brainstorming session to generate key message elements falling within each the following categories:
• Functional benefits
• Emotional benefits
• Main themes
• Problem statements (optional) and/or
• Reason to believe (optional)
  
  
• During one-on-one individual depth interviews, physicians select the top functional benefits, emotional benefits, main themes and reason to believe generated in the previous step. It is critical to expose respondents to the functional benefits before the emotional benefits and the main themes, since the functional benefits are really what physicians want to know about this brand first. In this respect, this process mimics the way physicians want to learn about new products.
  
  
• Physicians then compose a logical and persuasive message using one element from each category as outlined above. The output of this process is a recommendation regarding the optimal combination of elements that comprise the positioning statement.