Top Research Challenges in Big Pharma

It is the peak of this year’s flu season–and the GutCheck office has certainly not been immune to the new breed of bugs and viruses that go with this time of year. With all the coughing, sneezing, and sick days going around our office, it got us thinking about the benefits of agile market research within the pharmacy aisle.

Large pharmaceutical companies, otherwise known as ‘Big Pharma’, are divided into two sides of the house. First is Behind-the-Counter, which is made up of both prescription drugs and high-sensitivity drugs that are handled directly by a pharmacist. Second is Over-the-Counter, also known within the industry as Consumer Care. This division is made up of standard personal care items that can be found in your grocery pharmacy aisle, retail pharmacy, or club stores. Today we are going to focus on the challenges in market research as they apply specifically to the Consumer Care side.

Proliferation of Choice

Take a trip to your local retail pharmacy and look at the choices available in just the cold or pain medications. The options are dizzying. The specific symptoms each medication treats are as wide ranging as the options available. In the research industry, this is known as ‘proliferation of choice’ and it can be a very bad thing when it comes to shopper decisions. The pure amount of choice available can stop your consumer in their tracks. It can actually slow the purchasing decision, confuse the consumer, and ultimately cause your product, which might be the perfect solution for their symptoms, to get lost in the sea of choices.

So how do you stand out? How can you be sure that your claims are meaningful?

Adding a quick consumer read within your ideation, exploration, screening and refinement stages for packaging and messaging can really help to both find the right concepts sooner and kill the bad ones faster. Which will ensure your message will be clearly seen, understood, and valued at the point of sale.

Keep It Simple

If you spend any length of time in the pharma world you will find that the chemical makeup of many Over-the-Counter drugs is quite complex. While it is important to follow labeling requirements for these chemicals and their effects, the average consumer doesn’t really know what acetaminophen or naproxen sodium actually do for their symptoms. The focus of successful ad copy is always on the net benefit–how the medication contained inside will help the consumer feel better. As you create and refine your copy, it is always a good practice to gather quick consumer reads on these iterations to ensure the claims, points of difference, and reasons to believe are clearly understood.

Budget Matters

In the pharma space, budgets sometimes run differently than they are in other consumer packaged goods and retail insights teams. In some cases, budgets can be controlled by the brand and marketing teams rather than the specific product and insights teams. This means the insights teams need to gather the buy-in from several different departments in order to fund the segmentation and brand equity research they require in order to move their projects forward.

However, agile market research is designed to help you get a quick consumer read quickly, early and as often as needed whether it is quantitative or qualitative research. When budget and timelines are tight, agile market research is a great option for pharma insights teams (and others) so they don’t have to approach brand teams for exploratory work budget. Insights teams can now afford to test creative concepts early which provides brand and marketing teams with an independent view of how the concepts are working with their target market.

Learn More

If you would like to learn how agile market research can help solve common research challenges both inside and outside of the big pharma world, download our eBook to see more examples of how GutCheck can help.