What are peak sales?
Peak sales are an estimate of how much a drug’s sales will be at the time when it is selling the most during its lifecycle. Peak sales estimates are usually tabulated for a given year and are derived using forecasting exercises. The time at which a drug reaches its peak sales can depend on a number of different variables including but not limited to expected launch trajectory, potential for follow-on indications, competitive landscape, and exclusivity status (eg patent term, regulatory exclusivity, etc).
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What is New Product Planning?
New Product Planning in pharma refers to activities associated with preparing to bring a new development product to market. People working in the new product planning space are often responsible for several compounds at once and are typically commercial personnel responsible for the gamut of activities needed to understand the market, to develop initial forecasts, to understand and communicate key opportunities and challenges internally, to think about product positioning, etc.
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What is a Target Product Profile (TPP)?
A target product profile refers to what the expected properties of a drug will be once development (ie studies) are complete. It usually consists of many elements including information on expected dosing, route of administration, potential efficacy and safety profile, etc. As new data emerge once studies readout the TPP is generally updated to reflect the latest knowledge.
The TPP is an important strategic tool used within pharma companies to plan for and assess investigational agents including the market potential, potential marketing strategies, etc.
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What is an Awareness Trial Usage (ATU) study?
An awareness trial usage (ATU) study is a form of market research in which the aim is to get an idea of how many prescribers of interest are aware of the product being tested, how many have newly tried it, and how use is. Each ATU study is done at a point in time, but will often be repeated over time to see trends in the points of interest.
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What is a Speaker Bureau Program?
A Speaker Bureau Program is a collection of lectures by healthcare providers (HCPs) to other HCPs on a company’s product. They can also include interaction with the audience in the form of questions and discussion. Pharmaceutical companies fund these programs in order to further education and awareness of their products and data amongst the prescribing population.
As with most external communication sponsored by pharma, there are many regulations that need to be followed in the development of speaker bureau programs as well as in the recruitment and payment of HCPs to deliver content.
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What is market segmentation?
Market segmentation is a way to divide up a market into various subgroups with some similar characteristic. It is often deployed in order to better understand heterogeneity in the market as well as how to tailor strategy to specific segments and in order to best deploy limited company resources in growing the brand.
There are often various segmentation approaches deployed for a given drug product including provider segmentation, patient segmentation, and payer segmentation.
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What is Business Analytics?
Business Analytics functions in pharma analyze data to understand the market and sales growth. They work closely with the Brand and sales teams to generate insights into what may be driving or hindering sales growth, where opportunities may lie, and gaps in the current plan. The Business Analytics team is the internal expert on the datasets and supports the broader commercial team with their needs, often presenting data based on requests or that they believe are of importance to the overall brand strategy and operations.
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What is a Master Visual Aid?
A master visual aid (MVA) is a core deliverable for the brand marketing team and the key piece that sales representatives use in their interactions with providers. It usually contains the key messages for the brand along with key data on the drug. It is also typically visually appealing with vibrant images related to the theme of the messaging. The final messaging and content are carefully chosen, usually the winner of several concepts and many iterations that go through a considerable number of reviews and market research testing.
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What is life cycle management?
Life cycle management (LCM) is the process of planning for and managing the strategy around a drug’s place in the market from prior to regulatory approval through expiration of the patent or loss of exclusivity. LCM can include planning for follow-on studies after initial approval and potential label extensions.
Pricing can also be an important part of the LCM process as price hikes are typically lower in the earlier years of a drug’s life while focus is likely more on growth of the market and uptake, whereas when the drug nears generic or biosimilar competition, price hikes may be more common.
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