WHY IS COMMERCIAL PHARMA DEMANDING MORE FREQUENT ANALYTICS?
Overview
When you are in the insights business for life sciences companies, it is your job to make sure that the right data gets to the right people at the right time. Historically, running an analytic like a marketing mix model meant that the right time was once a year and the call plan was set once a quarter. The analytics team could deliver the results and then forget about doing it again for another ten months or ten weeks.
As the business demands have evolved, more frequent insights are needed and the supporting technology platforms have scaled to be able to meet the needs of the business. The set-and-forget paradigm is yielding to a more demanding cadence of delivery. What is causing this shift? What are the collateral upsides to having more frequent analytic deliveries?
Omnichannel Demands It
The business case for upping the analytics delivery tempo is being driven by the need to have better engagement with health care providers (HCPs) and patients. Marketers today care about customer preferences (responsiveness) and the effectiveness of the many promotional approaches that they spend money on. These preferences – like the measured effectiveness of the promotions – are constantly changing. Given how much money marketers invest in their programs, they do not want to wait an entire year to find out whether an approach is working or not. Commercial pharma organizations are working hard to make omnichannel marketing a reality and it does not happen without a clear, holistic understanding of what is happening on a daily basis.
More Experimentation
Because some tactics are short-lived experiments or ad hoc efforts, marketers are keen to understand if the investment has a positive return on the investment. If something appears to be working, why stop it? If a new initiative is lacking traction, how long should it stay active? Data-driven organizations know to let the data speak for itself, but it can only do so if the results are available to analyze. This is where the frequency of the analytics comes in.
Smarter Spend at Launch
Marketers are tasked with running campaigns that work and if they cannot gauge the results quickly, the real and opportunity costs of bad execution will be amplified. Faster feedback from the marketing analytics – especially when a drug is being launched – means that organizations can squeeze more out of limited budgets and tight timeframes. Marketing groups are becoming more agile. Flexible spend and targeting patterns yield better results, but only when they can assess them as close to real time as possible.
Constant Delivery Has Positive Consequences
There are significant plusses to increasing the analytic delivery windows. First, the more organizations deliver insights, the more these insights will be tested and evaluated. Long held (but false) assumptions die at the temple of good data. There is a certain discipline that comes naturally when insights are delivered at a higher frequency. A big benefit here is that analytic teams have more opportunities to study the results. Second, when new results are consistently published, a deeper understanding of how to interpret the results will emerge. For example, month-over-month shifts in impactable NBRx script counts in the mix model results will be easier to recognize and explain when they are available on a monthly basis instead of yearly. Finally, when the analytics are released at the same tempo that changes in the business are being made, a wider audience will be interested in observing the outcomes.
Parting Thoughts
Faster insights should not come at the expense of quality – this is common sense. However, analytics groups that deliver more frequently are positioned to offer their business partners more context and interpretation of the results the more they are asked to deliver. We call this interpretation prowess. A once-a-year readout of a mix model is going to be a much different experience than a quarterly (or even monthly) review when there is a wider audience interpreting the model results. Especially for brands that are still trying to gain market share after their launch, the value of seeing promotional effectiveness run-over-run will be high.
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SENTIER was founded in 2017 to disrupt analytic insight generation and delivery in Pharma. Through VELOCITY, the industry leading Analytic Operations as a Service (AOaaS) platform, our customers are able to maximize the ROI on AI and ML activities by allowing non-data scientists to deliver answers as frequently as the business demands. We also support our clients with advanced marketing & sales analytics and support services designed to prepare models and data pipelines for production. SENTIER believes that the ethical application of solutions will benefit patients and health care providers as well as the Pharma and Biotech companies we work with.
