Risks

By continuing to follow the sclerotic drug-development playbook that presumes markets will continue to magically materialize with the limitless introduction of exciting breakthrough discoveries, pharma condemns itself to:

• Living in a past that is likely gone, wherein revenues and profits are predicated on blockbuster drugs.
• Price-based competition in a market where differentiation is harder to achieve and premiums for clearly superior products are harder to attain.
• Lower market shares as competitors working similar products fight for a smaller slice of the pie.
• Pressured margins that result from stubbornly high development costs, lower sales and price pressure.
• Less money for essential profit-fueled R&D efforts.
• Not being positioned to lead, rather than follow the essential migration toward new marketing-led product development strategies.

Opportunities

Companies that embrace change and work to adopt methods of developing, positioning and marketing products that have worked for many other FMCG products can be better positioned to:

• Extract maximum value from more existing products.
• Resurrect moribund products after they go off-patent.
• Compete more aggressively and intelligently in markets where it’s difficult to stand out from the crowd.
• Design clinical trials that maximize the opportunity to sell products into markets identified as being highly susceptible to influence with the proper messaging and positioning.
• See a reason and find a way to compete with generic
• Build a more sustainable business that can wait out the return of a climate where a new era of discovery can propel entirely new classes and types of drugs forward.