The Business Challenge

A global pharmaceutical launch team faced a challenge that is simultaneously common and genuinely hard to solve: how do you identify a single, differentiated, and compelling global brand narrative across a category where HCP prescribing habits are deeply entrenched and the clinical data package is rich, complex, and regionally variable?

The category was defined by habitual prescription of tried-and-true therapies, HCP resistance to switching, and a clinical conversation dominated by surrogate endpoints that patients rarely understood. To succeed, the new brand needed to do more than communicate its data — it needed to shift how HCPs thought about the treatment paradigm itself.

At the same time, the global scale introduced a second challenge: earning trust and buy-in from local market teams who had seen global strategies fail to translate before, and who needed to see their market’s data reflected in the conclusions before they would commit to a shared narrative.

The S+R Approach

Shapiro+Raj built a research program that matched the ambition and complexity of the launch challenge — conducting over 400 HCP interviews across global markets and generating more than 7,000 pages of transcript data — while deploying Stella throughout the analysis phase to ensure no insight was missed and no bias went unchecked.

The exploratory foundation used our proprietary Fishbowl methodology — a provocative qualitative approach designed to create cognitive disruption rather than simply gather perspectives. By placing HCPs in structured confrontation with uncomfortable truths about their own prescribing behaviors and their impact on patients, the research surfaced authentic attitudinal openings that standard discussion guides never reach.

The message generation and prioritization phase used System-1 techniques — a swipe-right/swipe-left digital exercise — to rapidly cull 100+ candidate messages down to a testable core set, followed by System-2 deep dives using highlighting exercises, elevator pitch tasks, story flow co-creation, and metaphor elicitation exercises.

Additional quantitative rigor — anchored MaxDiff, drag-and-drop sequencing, and TURF analysis — produced statistically confident message and story flow recommendations across markets.

Stella was trained on the complete research corpus — all transcripts, quantitative data, and syndicated reports — and used throughout analysis to synthesize findings across markets, answer specific strategic questions, and detect patterns across thousands of data points that human analysts would have missed in any reasonable timeframe.

Insights Delivered

Strategic Impact

In less than two days after fieldwork closed, each local market team received a customized Stella-generated report containing their market’s specific findings — creating the local relevance that drives alignment without compromising the global narrative.

The outcome was described by the Global Insights Director as one of the most significant achievements of the launch: a game-changing, unified global strategy secured in 40% less time than any comparable program. The cross-functional alignment achieved — across brand, medical affairs, and local market teams globally — was unprecedented for an asset of this scale and complexity.