ZoomRx has dug into its data to see what messages resonate with healthcare professionals (HCPs) at different stages in pharma launches, generating a roadmap of which themes drugmakers should push and when.
The company looked at around 14,000 messages from more than 380 pharma brands to pick up patterns in the recall and effectiveness of marketing messaging among HCPs. ZoomRx split up the data into themes, such as product efficacy and indication, and tracked levels of recall and effectiveness at three stages in the drug launch life cycle, starting with the first six months on the market and ending 24 months after launch.
For newly launched drugs, ZoomRx found messages about the unmet need, innovation and patient type are most effective with HCPs. Similarly, messages about innovation, indication, approval, mode of administration and convenience drive the strongest recall.
ZoomRx said recall is highest for foundational messages that “help introduce a new brand to the market,” while the effectiveness of messaging early in a drug launch is “likely driven by a brand’s novelty and highlighting of its potential to close gaps in treatment.” The list of the top messages overlaps with the sort of disease and brand awareness campaigns that companies often run shortly after a drug launch.
What works, according to ZoomRx’s analysis, changes once a product has been on the market for at least six months. Between seven and 18 months after launch, the company found the recall and effectiveness of messaging highlighting innovation, approval, convenience and unmet need fall away. Instead, messages about efficacy, duration and dosing come to the fore in that period.
“As brands move into the recently launched phase, HCP are likely already primed with foundational messages and more receptive to key clinical messages,” ZoomRx said in a post discussing the analysis. “Efficacy and indication remain consistently effective, while unmet need effectiveness drops, potentially due to shifting HCP priorities as they become familiar with the brand.”
ZoomRx saw other shifts once brands had been on the market for 19 months. At that stage, messages about indication, efficacy, mechanism of action remain effective, according to the analysis, but the recall of several foundational messages such as convenience and mode of administration keeps falling.
Some types of messaging never top the recall and effectiveness charts throughout the first two years of a drug launch, per ZoomRx. Messages about testing, guidelines, clinical trial logistics and side effects tended to have lower recall, and safety, side effects and financial themes, such as access and insurance, were consistently found toward the bottom of the effectiveness ranking.
ZoomRx offered an explanation, suggesting that those messages were poorly recalled because they “serve to supplement and reinforce the brand’s core foundational and clinical messaging” and that the less effective financial themes have more relevance to office support staff than physicians.