A New Era of Individualized Care: Lessons from Orphan Drug Marketing

Introduction

From health coverage to cost to documenting outcomes, the perceived chaos and general unknowns surrounding health care is only worsening among patients, physicians, and payors.  With impending pay-for-performance measures—and the inevitable avoidance of high-risk patients by providers—more and more patients have no choice but to reluctantly assume responsibility for their own health. 

Across all disease categories, the impact of these uncertainties falls upon patients and physicians alike. They are desperate for support, clarity, and a new level of medical attention that goes beyond simple receipt and administration of therapeutics. 

This ever-expanding gap in healthcare delivery represents a key opportunity for biotech and pharmaceutical marketers to step in with a level of highly personalized attention that helps anchor patients’ own care and wellness. By taking a more individualized approach to marketing and communication, firms have the capability of building equities with greater depth and breadth among their constituents—equities that can be immediately accretive to the brand. 

Such personalized marketing and relationship-building strategies have historically been employed by highly successful orphan drug manufacturers/marketers like Genzyme, Sigma Tau, and others. Genzyme brands effectively engage with some of the world’s smallest patient and physician populations, and have established bonds with constituents that have withstood the test of time, competition, and even product unavailability. 

However, it is clear that this method can be applied even across large, mainstream indications by larger, less specialized manufacturers. Pharmaceutical products of all types, serving all size patient populations, can successfully deploy many of the rare drug marketers’ most targeted strategies to seize upon the current care gap in the market and thereby return value for their brands.

Why should a brand look to orphan drug strategies?

The rare disease therapeutics category has existed for a long time. It began with the US government commitment to underwrite development costs in order to incentivize manufacturers to market “orphan drugs” for disease states with very small patient populations. Sanofi Aventis’ purchase of Genzyme for $20 billion, as well as recent pharma and biotech M&As like Roche and Genentech, and Lilly and ImClone—along with Pfizer’s creation of an Orphan and Genetic Diseases Unit—demonstrate that the marketing of therapies for rare diseases has been recognized as a lucrative business opportunity. 

Rare disease drug marketing is notable for its level of personalization—small patient populations and small cohorts of practicing physicians make one-to-one marketing the most effective option. This has created audience and brand relationships that proceed on a first-name basis.

It is this type of relationship that can serve to bridge the widening gap in care, and deliver on unmet patient and physician needs. For a given indication, a single pharmaceutical product has the opportunity to help fill that void and act as a personal-care force for a given patient or physician—whether that be by helping a patient track therapeutic goals and delivering lifestyle-specific exercises and wellness solutions, for example, or assisting a physician in aggregating his or her own practice data to better assess patient progress. 

Advances in IT have allowed for the hyper-segmentation of both professional and patient targets creating markets of one, and advances in digital marketing channels enhance brand experiences of all kinds, especially virtual one-to-one communications. Evolution of new technologies will influence the development of content, channels, and engagement strategies for all the hyper-segments, and will completely morph how marketers conduct business on every level of the organization.

Big Arrow Group: bringing orphan drug strategies to larger markets

Big Arrow Group, Agency of Record for Sanofi Genzyme, has helped pioneer the concept of personalized genetic health. We focus on delivering value-added communications and tactics to hyper-segmented audiences—where even in a market of millions, the target can be addressed as the one-in-a-million. With this experience, we distill relevant marketing, branding, and communication strategies to help pharmaceutical marketers succeed, no matter what size patient population they serve.

Big Arrow guided Sanofi Genzyme in analyzing and addressing patient segments and the physicians who treat them, asking, where are our patients on the spectrum of symptoms? Diagnosis? Condition knowledge? Treatment initiation? Therapeutic goals? What are the physical and emotional barriers to advancement along this spectrum? And perhaps most importantly, where are patients on the spectrum of their own return to “normalcy”?  

As for physicians, where does each stand on condition familiarity and understanding? Treatment choices? Treatment preferences and protocols? How do they perceive their practice-based body of data for the condition? And are they true champions of the patient? The disease? Its treatment?

Addressing hyper-segmented audiences demands rigorous research and planning, as well as a proven infrastructure for analysis, assessment, and tactical execution. Market research and anecdotal information can be effectively condensed to reflect patient, physician, or other stakeholder attitudes, actions, and reactions on a near-individual level. When this information is plotted against business objectives and coupled with highly-targeted tactics, a powerful and effective marketing and branding effort takes form—one that opens the door to one-on-one relationship-building with patients and physicians as individuals, rather than members of a generalized target.

Framing the highly specialized content development and delivery, requires multi-tiered marketing and communications strategies designed to prime previously untapped disease markets, develop and foster relationships with key physicians and the patients they treat, identify and capitalize upon marketing synergies in therapeutic pipelines, and employ both pull- and push-marketing methods to harness existing—and create new—product and service demand.

Part and parcel of this effort, we carefully and thoughtfully craft the brand—its image, its voice, its identity, its connection to patients, physicians, and other stakeholders—to establish “irreplicable” equities to help insulate the brand and avoid commoditization in a competitive market, whether that be a present or future threat. All of this is executed through a lens of understanding and awareness of the individual—in every stakeholder group—as opposed to a broad segment.