Brand Positioning in Pharma

Book excerpt: Why a book on Brand Positioning in Pharma, a fifty-plus year-old-concept, particularly when new age marketing frameworks such as Customer Experience, Design Thinking, Agile Marketing, Content Marketing, Closed Loop Marketing, Omnichannel Marketing, and others are disrupting pharmaceutical marketing? Two reasons. Firstly, Brand Positioning is not a marketing framework but a Foundational Principle. It is customer-centric at its core and competition-oriented—two of the most important aspects of marketing. Secondly, while most marketers know what Positioning is, many are unclear on how to do it effectively. Hence this book, Brand Positioning in Pharma. Brand Positioning in Pharma aims to show how to create a winning positioning strategy for your Brand in a hyper-crowded market like pharmaceuticals. Jack Trout and Al Ries pioneered the Positioning concept. They described it first in an article, Positioning is a game people play in today's me-too marketplace, published in the June 1969 issue of Industrial Marketing. They stated in the article that Positioning is a mental device that helps the typical consumer deal with overwhelming, unwanted advertising. In comparison, today's consumer is much more overwhelmed with countless unwanted advertising messages. In healthcare and Pharma, physicians, apart from other advertising messages, are constantly bombarded with numerous messages from Pharma companies. To survive in this overcrowded pharmaceutical marketplace, and if a Prescription Drug Brand's voice is to be heard above the current noise level, Pharma Marketers need a precise, meaningful, and relevant Positioning. Positioning that resonates with the customer. Brand Positioning in Pharma shows you how to do that, with fifty-two case studies demonstrating how some innovative marketers creatively positioned their products and won. Contents: 1. Brand Positioning 2. Disease Branding 3. Drug Repositioning 4. Blue Ocean Strategy 5. Framing 6. Brand Positioning in the Digital Age