Sunday, February 28, 2010

Cell Phone App Convenience Is Not A Strategy

I was in Barnes & Noble the other week shopping for books. Not a big deal, but I also have a Kindle and are an Amazon Prime member. Yes, there are some real paper books that don’t come on e-readers but that wasn’t the nature of my browsing.

I was interested in science fiction or a mystery, just kind of felt it after reading Moby Dick. As I had 30 minutes to kill before seeing Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart, I decided to browse. I saw a book by Henning Mankell. It sounded interesting. So I scanned the bar code with my Droid cell phone’s bar scanner and emailed the title to my RemembertheMilk.com task reminder account. There was Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. Scan, click, email. Now I had two new books on my reading list.

I felt bad for Barnes & Noble. They were providing me with a very pleasant in-store browsing shopping experience but they weren’t going to receive any of my commerce that day.

So what do you make of cell phone retailer buying applications? It is great if you are in Bloomingdale’s and they don’t have your size. You scan the bar code, go to the store’s web site and order the size you want while you are right in the store. The New York Times notes that Wal-Mart, Disney, Kerr Drug and Crate & Barrel are testing this technology.

IBM has developed Presence that detects the “presence” of signed-up shoppers as soon as they enter a store, which allows the store to immediately send promotions to their cell phone. Cisco has Mobile Concierge that allows you to locate items within a given store, a must-have app if you are browsing in a Wal-Mart Super-Center or a Target. And Motorola is developing a cell phone app that puts a net-connected loyalty card on your cell phone.

All these technologies are wonderful. They make the shopping experience easier and hopefully increase a customer’s shopping basket. And they well may do so, but only to a limited point.

As David Ogilvy rightly once said, convenience is not a strategy.

Consumers have to want the product first. They have to appreciate its features and benefits and recognize the value. And then they will buy.

A product’s sales can increase when you make the buying experience easier, provide more information about the product itself and facilitate the actual purchase process.

Just like that old promotional truism of placing a product at eye level on a store shelf does.

But ultimately that does not make a product winner.

That’s why understanding and identifying the real consumer insight is so important. Technology itself is not the end; it is one element of the means. And it cannot replace the fundamental basics of sound product development.

Now, excuse me, I have to go to a friend’s house for dinner and I don’t know which wine to bring so I am going to scan some bar codes on my cell phone at Zachys liquor store.

Monday, February 15, 2010

Now Really! Chasing out the horrors in oncology drug development

In continuing to think about emerging issues in oncology, regulatory will play a critical and significant role.

In the UK, you just have to wonder what to do when the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) rejects Novaretis' Afinitor for second line therapy in renal cell carcinoma and recommends against using Novartis' Tasigna and BMS' Sprycel for the treatment of patients with chronic myeloid leukaemia (CML) who are intolerant to Glivec. Why? There was that little thing about insufficient clinical evidence vs. other treatment options, but, oh by the way, if Novartis or BMS are willing to risk share and compensate for their price, well then, that's okay.

Oh, really? Now really! As Seth Meyers and Amy Poehler might say on Saturday Night Live. That's really NICE!

Just how long is it okay for any of us to live if it is too costly for the government? The next thing you know the NHS will be calling up the Inuit to buy some ice floes for cancer patients so they can push them off into the North Sea. Or maybe they can get that ice from Iceland which is in enough financial trouble as it is.

The basis point is that, for companies to succeed with regulators, Overall Survival (OS) and for how long life goes on remain the key endpoint.

All in all, a focused commercial development strategy in oncology requires a tightly defined Target Product Profile (TPP) in order to win with regulators and to aid physicians in understanding their treatment choices. This narrowed approach could enable companies to get their drug on the market faster, enabling oncologists to understand how they best may employ it along with other treatment options.

Of course, after you have figured out first what you are going after, a Life-Cycle Management (LCM) strategy needs to be built off that narrowed initial indication. Here it is helpful to complete all Phase I/II studies even prior to first approval with a full Phase III plan already in place.

As these plans are being developed, it is also important for companies to understand how this asset and its development plan aligns with other drug programs in the portfolio.

Many companies get caught up in the value of one particular drug programs without fully appreciating its value on everything else going on, a major point of understanding in a world of limited, expensive resources. A company needs to be able to value its "real" portfolio as opposed to making a decision about one stand-alone asset.

The key is to understand drug program inter-dependencies around technical, revenue and cost factors. An optimized portfolio that takes into account all these factors can actually yield significant economic benefits for a company over time vs. a stand-alone portfolio of individual assets. In an optimized oncology portfolio, a company can draw on identified synergies in research, clinical and targeted synergies to maximize the overall cost of commercial development and launch.

There are so many different considerations to be successful in oncology, it can make the head spin like Linda Blair in The Exorcist. However, by carefully and diligently, laying out basic strategies and developing an integrated series of approaches that involve not just one compound, but all the others in development, internally and competitively, oncology commercial development does not have to be a horror show. The demons can be exorcised, and a happy life can be lived by patients, physician and company managers.

Saturday, February 06, 2010

Sound Strategies Needed in Oncology, Just As Much As In Smartphones

Last week it was about sku management of smartphone applications. This week, it is how do you think the commercial implications of oncology commercial programs.

Oncology is the fastest growing therapeutic areas, going from $48 billion in 2008 to $80 billion in 2012. For the pharmaceutical industry, oncology is an intense area of activity with 1,000 clinical compounds in development and over 2,000 pre-clinical compounds being considered.

As in many other business areas, like smartphone apps and other fast moving consumer goods, the oncology disease space, spurred by new pathway discoveries, is becoming increasingly fragmented with the identification of different patient and disease sub-segments. It isn't just prostate cancer, it is six different variants of prostate cancer.

In targeting the commercial opportunity, companies can benefit from a differentiation strategy that goes after well-defined patient segments, with those definitions aided by the use of bio-markers to help call out cancer indication.

As a result, discovery is increasingly focused on targets vs. tumors, with the opportunity for the same compounds to address multiple different kinds of tumors. Then, with even greater success, in many instances, cancer treatment has the opportunity to evolve into a chronically managed disease, like diabetes and high cholesterol, with the use of adjuvant and maintenance drug therapies.

As these sub-segments develop, companies also have the possibility of facing less competition when they are focused on very narrowly defined indication sub-segment and lines of therapy. This focus could also allow the company to realize a premium for its drug given a lack of other efficacious and safe alternatives. Here, as in many product developments, early to market strategies are critical and novel partnerships may be required, especially given combination therapies.

That said, good sound commercial strategies, applicable across a broad range of industries, and understanding the target audience and the delivery process, are critical to success in the market, whether it is a cancer drug or a smartphone application.