Unlocking Growth in Emerging Markets: The Value of Experience & Best Practice Sharing in Pharma for Competitive Strategy and Brand/Portfolio Planning
In an ever-evolving pharma landscape, Emerging Markets (EM) exhibit distinct characteristics and dynamics and often employ a siloed approach to planning, missing opportunities to realise efficiencies and optimise effectiveness.
Global pharma brand or portfolio strategy frameworks are developed based on key drivers of internal brand/portfolio situational changes and external market evolution in a disease area. These manifest differently in individual emerging market countries due to the heterogeneity of EM characteristics. Local cross-functional teams in EM markets typically work independently to translate and implement global pharma brand or portfolio strategies at the local level, given their country-specific knowledge of market dynamics. Intensifying the challenge of ‘siloed’ local planning, Emerging Pharma Markets often have resource constraints, with a limited headcount and budget. This is further exacerbated by EM landscapes facing heightened price sensitivity.
Fostering emerging markets collaboration is key in addressing critical questions to unlock success in strategic planning.
Multi-national pharma companies have a clear opportunity to facilitate local brand or portfolio planning across the seemingly diverse set of EM markets by enabling collaboration. The process of local planning can be significantly optimised by facilitating the identification of common business questions, key challenges and opportunities across EM, and bringing together the right people across markets to collaboratively explore these issues.
A global brand may be facing critical changes in market dynamics with varying implications across emerging markets, for example a new in-class competitor or evolving treatment guidance landscapes. They should apply experience and best practice sharing to answer critical business questions:
Critical Business Questions
- What are the common opportunities and challenges across emerging markets?
- What tactical solutions have been successfully implemented?
- How might existing solutions or resources be applied or adapted to individual EM markets?
- What approaches might be best avoided based on prior experience in other markets?
- What are the priority actions each market should take away from this discussion?
- What are the next steps?
- Who is responsible for the implementation of each priority action item?
There are three key benefits of running an ‘experience and best practice sharing’ exercise for emerging markets:
Cultivation of a cost-effective learning ecosystem.
When the right people are brought together a centralised learning opportunity is created. This enables participants to benefit directly from a wealth of experiences and case studies that already exist in other local teams. Markets can therefore better streamline their resources to avoid duplicative investment or costly mistakes and focus on proven approaches. This benefit can be particularly valuable for companies that are launching into a new therapeutic area or an introducing an asset based on an innovative technology, where local emerging market teams may not have significant experience of the supportive activities needed.
Accelerated adaptation to pharma market dynamics.
EM are often characterised by greater challenges in monitoring market dynamics and predicting evolution. These may be associated with difficulties in sourcing reliable local data, or less transparent regulatory processes, meaning the competitive landscape is hard to assess accurately. The ability to condense the learning curve is beneficial where there may be a need for markets to react quickly to new learnings and adapt tactical plans to optimise local implementation, for example when a market learns that a new competitor will be launching earlier than expected.
Amplification of creativity in solution development.
By bringing together diverse markets to pool insights and experiences, not only is there collaborative knowledge amplification, but new and refined solutions are delivered. A forum for exchange of ideas across markets promotes creativity and fosters innovation, which would be more challenging to do as individual EM units. As a result, markets are empowered to build smarter and more creative tactical plans. Highly competitive market environments in particular benefit from such cultivation of creativity where innovation is paramount for success.
The benefits of establishing and nurturing a thriving ecosystem of experience-sharing are not limited to EM.
This approach is also invaluable to enable more established markets to optimise local brand/portfolio plans and can enable maximization of resource efficiency across country teams. Furthermore, regional and global brand/portfolio teams benefit from global-EM knowledge exchange. Discussions in a multi-country forum can highlight common needs for support to address key business questions that can be met by regional or global initiatives.
Investment in collaboration will result in optimisation of brand/portfolio impact.
Brand and portfolio teams need to create cross-country and cross-region networks and prioritise the convening of frequent experience-sharing forums, whether through in-person workshops or via interactive digital platforms. The connection of peers across geographies and provision of opportunities for collaboration requires application of resources – participant time and travel, leadership time, agency investment – but investment will be recouped by realising resource efficiencies and outputs that maximise brand/portfolio plan impact and ultimately growth.
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