Analyzing Brand Performance
Maximizing brand potential requires planning and executing brand initiatives to achieve sales targets. This sounds straightforward on paper but is messy in reality. It requires identifying relevant consumer, customer, market, and brand insights out of terabytes of internal and 3rd party data to drive competitive advantage. It requires manual analysis, handovers, and potential delays resulting in missed commercial opportunities. It is no wonder that effective strategic brand planning is top of mind for business leaders in pharma today.
The goal of this post is to understand the market performance of a fictitious drug brand — Entruvica — compared to competitors (Mycobutin, Stendryx, etc.) to uncover actionable insights to drive targeted marketing efforts at underperforming Healthcare Professionals (HCPs) to ultimately boost market share and profitability. We encourage you to follow along by requesting a free 14 day trial of Tellius (no credit card necessary) and accessing the dummy dataset below.
The Data
Our dummy data consists of multiple internal data sources (prescriptions, sales, operations, etc.) and multiple 3rd party prescription activity datasets from IMS, Plantrak, APLD, and Xponent joined together.
The data’s schemas consist of
- Weekly prescription activity at HCP level
- Performance metrics: TRx, NRx, NBRx
- TRx = Total Prescriptions
- NRx = New Prescriptions
- NBRx = New-to-Brand Prescriptions
- Sales Activity / Calls
- Call Planning, Targeting, Alignment
- HCP details
- Plan-level info
Tellius Solution
Let’s now dive into how a brand analytics team can go from connecting to all your complex data sources to delivering meaningful insights to the business on areas to take action.
Data Preparation
We start by loading data from multiple sources, including internal and external sources.
Once the data is loaded, Tellius helps us evaluate the quality of the data by inferring the data types of each column and automatically detecting any inconsistencies in the data.
Before analyzing the data, we need to perform feature engineering to extract more information on the HCPs. Tellius’s data preparation capabilities enables users to leverage Point & Click data transformations and/or existing SQL/Python scripts to create new variables directly in the platform.
We need to create deciles to categorize the HCPs into 10 groupings based on their total prescription volume.
Step 1: aggregate data at HCP level to calculate total prescription volume
Step 2: use a SQL script to create deciles
SQL Script:
SELECT HCP_ID, TRxs_total, NTILE (10) OVER (ORDER BY TRxs_total DESC) Decile FROM market_deciles
Tellius Prep provides full flexibility for the advanced users to incorporate required business logic by manipulating the data in any way or creating Calculated Columns, so as to layer domain knowledge/ IP onto the data by formulating ratios and aggregations as shown in the sample below.
Exploratory Analysis
Now that the data is ready for analysis, let’s begin answering ad-hoc business questions using Tellius’s powerful natural language search interface that understands your question, calculates an answer in seconds across the entire dataset (in this case, 0.125 Sec on 6M rows!), and returns the best fit visualization based on the variables used in your question. This means you can run multiple permutations of the hypothesis you are formulating in a fraction of the time you would have in traditional tools.
Business Question: what is the weekly trend in TRxs by brand? Market recovery post-COVID?
SEARCH –> weekly total rx by product
When we look at the TRx trends, nothing really stands out. It does appear the market is starting to recover post-COVID. Let’s now look at the trend in patient acquisition.
Business Question: what is the weekly trend in NBRx market share by brand?
SEARCH –> weekly marketShare NBRx by Product for PSO
It appears our competitor, Mycobutin, is growing in new patient acquisitions (NBRx). Let’s modify our search to focus on our brand (Entruvica) vs Mycobutin…
SEARCH –> weekly marketShare NBRx for entruvica vs mycobutin
Guided Insights
What is causing this marketshare slip? Let’s check Tellius’s AI-powered Insights to detect why.
In a matter of minutes, Tellius scanned millions of data points and uncovered the key facts driving our competitor’s increase in market share. Using the subnational-level data, we were able to uncover that Mycobutin is growing significantly in Inland Empire territory, Phoenix North within Arizona, and most importantly, among non targets (NTs). These are actionable insights we are able to directly pass on to the Sales and Marketing teams to adjust our targeting strategy.
Unlike the current approach, which is manual and hypothesis driven, Tellius is providing us with important facts that ensures we do not miss out on any opportunities. How? Tellius removes the bias from the analysis and automatically diagnoses every possible combination of why market share changed and highlights the key drivers for this trend break. With these new insights, the business quickly pivots its strategy and reprioritizes its field force.
Let’s now configure the Tellius Feed, so Tellius can provide proactive insights into the leading indicators of performance.
How? As data streams in, Tellius will continuously monitor all our leading indicators and automatically alert us with actionable insights if there have been any statistically significant changes.
Let’s see if Tellius can pinpoint where Mycobutin is dominating our brand, Entruvica. I can slice and dice the data by variables I am familiar with, but that introduces bias into the analysis.
Business Question: where is Mycobutin outperforming us?
SEARCH –> show market share nbrx for entruvica compared to mycobutin by territory for PSO in may 2020
Once again, Tellius came to the rescue and analyzed every HCP segment and prescription activity to identify the factors having the largest impact on our underperformance vs. Mycobutin in a matter of minutes. Quickly highlighting more insights into not only where Mycobutin is growing in New Patient Starts, but also where are dominating us in share among NJ, PA, and Tier 1 targets.
Predictive Analytics
With these new insights in hand, the decision to be made is clear — put more sales resources in underperforming areas NJ, PA, and Tier 1 targets as well as shore up weaknesses in Inland Empire territory and Phoenix North within Arizonan — but the next question is, could we identify high prescriber propensities of Entruvica to more specifically target HCPs moving forward? In Tellius, we can do this with the click of a button via AutoML.
Summary
As we showcased above, Tellius delivers value across the commercial aspects of the pharma industry by providing brand teams with a unified analytics experience across data sources to enable faster answers to what happened with a Google like interface, explanations for business metric changes, and how to improve business outcomes by understanding the drivers of those behaviors.
Take Tellius for a free 14 day spin (no credit card necessary) and follow along with the dummy dataset. Tellius is useful for a variety of other commercial pharma applications or download our Guide to AI-Driven Analytics for Life Sciences.
