Optimizing marketing mix for a blockbuster drug improves revenue

Class: Anti-depressionRevenue: > $1 billion

Field Force Size: 2,500 

Physicians: 125,000

Achievable ROI: $25 million

IP Rights Status: Available for license

By measuring physician response to myriad promotional and non-promotional activities and accurately forecasting physician-level prescribing behavior, optimization permits our clients to maximize their marketing mix ROI. 

In this engagement our team optimized the marketing mix for nearly 125,000 target physicians in the SSRI market. Our work began by calculating physician-level promotional sensitivity to key tactics such as details, meetings and events, and professional journal and direct-to-consumer advertising. A key objective of this work was to separate collateral effects in order to expose the unique contribution made by simultaneous promotional events. We next controlled for key non-promotional effects such as disease incidence and prevalence, seasonality, and census markers. Then, using a scenario builder we considered thousands of possible marketing mix allocations, each one resulting in a forecast of total prescriptions in the SSRI market for both our client’s brand and competitor brands. The scenario builder included a dynamic market forecast component that predicted competitor responses to each proposed change in our client’s promotion mix, thereby providing our client with a clear, short-term view of the market landscape.

The result? Our client deployed the tool in their periodic POA process so that Sales and Marketing leadership could explore, in real-time, the resulting ROI of each level of promotional investment considered. Optimizing the marketing mix at a physician-level unearthed achievable ROI of $25 million.