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Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese military strategist wrote: Conquerors estimate before the war begins, and they consider everything; the defeated also estimate before the war, but they do not consider everything. Estimating completely creates victory; estimating incompletely causes failure. When we look at it from this point of view, it is very obvious who will win the war.
This was often quoted in the context of business - with good reason, because in our increasingly competitive marketplace, being successful requires the same kind of strategic discipline. What is particularly apt about this quote is the estimating completely bit. In pharma marketing terms, this is about understanding as much as you can about what your competitors could do in the future in order to make your strategy as robust as possible. Most marketers realise the importance of gaining insight into their competitors, but translating todays insight into future foresight, is much more revealing; helping us interpret what competitors could do. The shift within pharma to more specialised markets highlights the need for companies to bring brands to market swiftly, with a keen eye on the landscape, including possible competitors. At the same time, the EMA has been quoted as wanting to encourage greater competition within the sector to improve innovation, quality, value and diversity of treatments available for patients - whilst applying scrutiny to strategies that are deemed as anti-competitive So pre-empting the competition needs to be done in an appropriate anti-trust context (see section at end of article). It is clear that in most situations we face competitors; but whereas in the past more specialist areas have been less competitive than the big primary care markets, we are now seeing the same level of competition in those areas too
This also translates into biotechnology with more companies becoming proficient, plus companies such as Pfizer highlighting their desire to be market leaders in this field. We are increasingly working with companies facing a significant competitive threat in orphan and rare disease markets, in which there was once just a few small companies competing. So competition is stronger than ever, and in many ways that is very healthy. From a customer perspective it helps keep medicines budgets under control, it provides greater innovation in the system, and on the whole it provides patients with access to better medicines. Using competitive foresight to adapt your strategies will cause the competition to make their move, to which you will need to adapt - and so it never stands still.
Your competitors ambition will be central in influencing how they go about developing their strategy, and how they will react to competitors (i.e. your) moves. One of the first questions you may want to consider is their financial goals; short term and long term. This will tell you whether they are going for absolute market growth or whether they are actually trying to gain as much profit from this product as they can. What are their beliefs and values? What current pressures are they under? These will help you understand their hot buttons if you threaten them - and equally, the areas where you could go unnoticed or comfortably co-exist. What is their attitude to risk? Understanding that, and how they react to competition, is a pretty good indicator of how they might react to your own strategies. Decoding a companys goals and ambitions for the future is critical, because it ultimately helps you formulate the most appropriate strategy yourself. Can you peacefully co-exist, and do you want to? If not it helps you understand the consequences; if your competitor has a product which is important to them strategically and emotionally, tackling them head-on will require a completely different approach and skill set. The second thing you need to understand is their organisational view of the world - how they understand the marketplace, and even how they view themselves. If they have a particular view of the way the market works, then you may be able to work out a strategy where you dont need to take them on head-on, so they wont see you coming. If, for example, their view of the world is that the whole patient voice piece is simply irrelevant, and therefore they spend all their time and energy on the doctor, you may be able to create a strategy which is about leveraging the patients voice, whilst going relatively unnoticed. You get to see the opportunities by looking at their blind-spots in their view of the world. Identifying this view of the world is relatively straightforward. Look at how it communicates about itself, about its future, about the opportunities that exist. Where is it investing its energy and its resources? How historically has the competition leveraged their offering? How emotionally attached does it appear to be to this marketplace or this patient population? Next comes their current strategy; understanding this will help you understand the strategy for the future. Generally pharma marketers are pretty good at understanding the core components of our direct competitors strategy; we are less good at considering it in the context of the overall company. There are lots of indicators of a company or product strategy. For example, chief executives like to stand up and tell people about how clever their strategy is, what they are doing, and how they are approaching it. Is your competitor aiming for growth through focused knowledge and energy in a certain therapy area or technology? Are they diversifying their portfolio and managing risk that way? If their strategy is about becoming the number one bio-pharmaceutical company, what implications does that have on their future strategy? Are they going to be the key specialist in rare diseases, or in personalised medicine? When considering the most appropriate strategy for your business unit or brand you must also consider the tier below, and the implications at business unit level. If they are a company that has a broad strategy of diversification, but one particular business unit has real focus within a therapy area, consider what pressures this exerts on the business unit, and how this influences their future strategy. The final part in the jigsaw is to understand what your competitors are good at. You can consider a lot of different things at a whole company level, from the products they promote, their marketing capabilities, their distribution network, their clinical trial programme, their corporate management, or their financial positioning; down to the tactical level around their sales teams and marketing materials.
This helps you understand how capable the company is at achieving its overall ambition - and the possible areas of danger. If you go up against a company that has a fantastic, proactive legal department which will take on anybody who tries to challenge their patent or their position in the marketplace, you have to recognise the degree of risk involved. This is a quick look at the different areas to find competitive insight. You now need to look at those four buckets together, play them out decoding the competitors future strategy so as to optimise your own.
Rather, its about understanding and anticipating your competitors in such a way that you optimise your own strategy and approach. Competition is healthy - because it keeps the market alive and keeps innovation happening - we need to understand more about our competitors to optimise our own approach. And in optimising our approach, they will inevitably optimise theirs. The one thing you can rely on is that in a market with more than one product, the approach and strategy of one company will be influenced by the other player or players in the market and each will react to the competitions moves. So the whole interplay between the competition is in part what brings about better access to medicines, better pricing and better innovation. In other words, having an insight into what your competitors are doing doesnt lead to the stifling of competition, rather it provides future foresight that actually enhances the competition and potentially ups everyones game.