Learn about Condition Branding

IMS has announced it is to host its first Pharma Leadership Conference held in Paris on 3rd & 4th July. The theme of this workshop is Condition Branding, an idea created by Professor Reinhard Angelmar in a groundbreaking paper published in the Journal of Medical Marketing Vol 7, 2007.

Condition Branding means looking beyond the marketing of the products themselves to the broader factors surrounding treatment. Examples abound, including ailments as diverse as AIDS, breast cancer, schizophrenia and restless leg syndrome. The approach expands the traditional view of branding, which is product centric, to one that takes into account not only the product, but also the treatment category and the condition itself in a three-tiered approach.

Times are changing rapidly for pharma, and these changes go far beyond shifts in legislation. Patients and prescribers are becoming more knowledgeable, while the diseases treated are becoming more obscure. The industry is moving toward specialty products on one hand, and toward new indications on the other. The question then arises about how to position these conditions?

IMS Health is co-operating with business academia in order to combine unique market insight with the conceptual innovations coming from the world's top business professors. The fruit of this co-operation will be sharper, more applied ideas that are both paradigm-breaking and founded on solid, and often surprising, market information.

The importance of condition branding becomes particularly relevant when considering the patient journey: how patients become aware of their diseases, what they do about them, and how the medical community reacts to them. It has repercussions both at the prescriber and at the patient level, and can advance the interests of all: patients, prescribers and the pharmaceutical industry.

It demands a broader, more strategic approach to pharmaceutical marketing, but used correctly, it can give rise to resounding successes.

Last year, IMS conducted an internal study of launch excellence, analysing vast amounts of market data to identify those elements that contribute to best-practice pharmaceutical product launches. Currently, the organisation is working with Professor Angelmar to go more deeply into this topic, in the context of his condition branding principles. The Pharma Leadership Conference will examine the initial results of this co-operation.

Professor Angelmar is the Salmon and Rameau Fellow in Healthcare Management and Professor of Marketing at INSEAD. He is well established as one of Europe's leading figures in the domain of pharmaceutical marketing. During the workshop, he will present his ideas directly, the participants can then test them via a realistic computerized business simulation. Lastly, a senior IMS executive will present some of the analysis and data that went into the study, as well as a general exposé of the current European market situation.

As the industry changes, forward-thinking executives will want to know how marketing will be done in the future, not how it was done in the past. The Leadership Conferences, and the co-operation they represent between the world's most innovative academics and IMS's unique view on the pharmaceutical industry, will allow executives a glimpse into a variety of different future paths. It will be up to them to decide which path they wish to take, and therefore shape the industry for the years to come.

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