The Challenge

Our client, a leading pharmaceutical company, was preparing for the launch of a new indication and needed to define a clear, meaningful position in a crowded, complex market without significant clinical differentiation.

The Solution

Knowing that the client team had already conducted a large amount of market research over the prior year, we started with an in-person workshop to draw out the team’s hypotheses. The goal of the hypothesis workshop was not to rearticulate known drivers and barriers, but rather let drivers and barriers serve as a launch pad for hypothesizing deeper, non-clinical ‘ways in’ for the new indication.

At S+R, our research team is complimented by a team of strategists skilled in translating insights into crisp, inspiring strategy materials that resonate with brand teams and agencies alike. Guided by our unique perspective on creating truly game-changing positioning we closely partnered with the creative agency to translate the insights from the workshop into four distinct positioning territories designed to differentiate the brand’s indication and make physicians care.

We conducted a mix of 1:1 interviews and dyads with community oncologists and surgeons to achieve these objectives. The research fielding and reporting was an extremely iterative and collaborative process, as we regularly met with the client team and creative agency during fielding to discuss emerging insights, the performance of each territory, and ways to refine the territories.

As a result, over the course of fieldwork, we tested two new versions of the positioning territories, with optimizations informed by physician feedback. Since the team was in a time crunch to quickly prepare for the upcoming launch, we co-planned and facilitated a combined research readout with a second market research agency, in order to synthesize learnings and recommendations from our positioning research and their whitepaper testing research. Our research and strategy teams seamlessly collaborated with our main client and the other research agency to ensure that our final recommendations were aligned and factually based on our research insights.

The Outcome

Importantly, the S+R recommendations swayed the team away from one specific territory they had been considering, to a different direction, in order to focus on the stronger “hook” for physicians.