How competitive intelligence can give pharma companies an edge

Competitive intelligence (CI) is a key tool that can help healthcare organisations gain valuable insights into their marketplace, their competitors and their customers to enable more effective decision-making and greater revenue.

Valuable CI can include learnings from conferences, market direction through the tracking and analysis of competitors (development plan and timelines, development strategy, approvals and launches), benchmarking to uncover new opportunities, and analysis to identify unmet needs in the market.

Eric Bishea, global leader, healthcare consulting, at GlobalData believes CI is a vital weapon in any pharma company’s arsenal.

He says: “Insightful actionable analysis from curated and personalised CI tracking provides senior clinical and commercial decision-makers with pre-qualified understanding of peer-set competitors’ strategies and market direction.

“This allows for real-time, proactive, strategic decision-making, in tune with the competitive landscape.”

What valuable insights can CI offer you?

• It will keep you updated on market trends, emerging technologies and evolving customer needs, and allow you to identify new market opportunities and potential growth areas.
• It provides valuable insight into your competitors’ strategies – product development, pricing, marketing and distribution – so you can respond by improving your offerings to gain a competitive edge.
• It will help you identify potential threats, such as competitor launches, patent expirations or new players in the market, allowing you to adjust your strategy and minimise potential disruptions to your business.
• It will enable you to identify gaps in the market, and fine-tune your product development strategies and existing products.

Ongoing monitoring and key data

GlobalData’s CI offering provides everything from alerts on events that could have an impact to monthly briefings and insights on emerging trends from key opinion leaders to on-the-ground coverage of scientific conferences from experts.

The company’s CI Tracker enables ongoing monitoring of developments across a range of disease areas, with an emphasis on providing insight into market events. It provides comprehensive coverage of key scientific conferences, from the planning stage through to post-event insights and presentations highlighting the market impact of the research presented.

GlobalData provides both syndicated and fully customised support.

Quick results

Clients adopting CI can see fast results, says Bishea. “From day one, a comprehensive CI strategy empowers users to make real-time decisions, based on prioritised shifts in current competitive scenarios,” he says.

“Collectively, comprehensive CI provides broader context to future clinical, regulatory, and commercial opportunities and risks, and the development of aligned propositions that maximise asset value over the longer term,” he adds.

GlobalData’s CI service includes the following:

• Monthly Intelligence Briefings, which summarise key monthly events with deep-dive implications, along with relevant news, publications and clinical trials.
• Quarterly Competitor Landscapes offer a report on key updates with tables and calculations.
• Conference Coverage provides an event planner, at-conference support, photo and file sharing, and a clinical and commercial key lessons report.
• Ad Hoc Support KOL Insight Briefings give deep-dives into leader opinions on key issues affecting clinical practice, with topics acting as seeds for future discussion, plus briefing sessions with internal stakeholders.

Case study one: intelligence on market competitors

A top-ten pharma company wanted to know how its competitors were generating and using real-world evidence (RWE) data to support the success of their late-stage and marketed assets in key immunology indications.

GlobalData developed a RWE database, capturing competitior RWE study details, RWE data outputs (journal publications and conference abstracts), and any commercialisation of RWE by competitors (industry symposia, press releases, exhibit booth materials). It leveraged this data to produce an in-depth RWE profile report for the client’s key immunology competitors, which is updated every six months.

The client renewed the project for an additional three years and expanded the number of indications from one to four.

Case study two: intelligence on opportunities in new markets

A top pharma client wanted to assess the market potential and opportunity in seven global markets – China, Korea, Japan, Russia, Brazil and Mexico. It also requested a revenue forecast for an asset in development for Crohn’s Disease and Ulcerative Colitis to help with launch decision making.

GlobalData gave the client a comprehensive overview of the disease landscape specific to each international market of interest. It used its internal data and secondary research, and its epidemiological data. This was complemented by third-party demand-based sales data and triangulated with an in-depth literature search in order to validate, refine and tailor the data that would feed the revenue model’s inputs. This generated country-specific revenue forecasts that relied solely on secondary research inputs.

The successful project involved a lot of collaboration between GlobalData and the client’s leadership teams.

Case study three: intelligence on antibacterial and antifungal markets

GlobalData supported a leading global pharma manufacturer with year-long continuous competitive intelligence (CI) tracking of key strategic ID indicators to ensure senior management kept a competitive edge and grew revenue. The scope of the service focused on the provision of ongoing coverage of activity in the antibacterial and antifungal markets, mainly in the US and Europe.

Tracking involved: CI email alerts in response to major market events, updated competitor product profiles, a monthly competitive intelligence executive summary, dedicated analyst/consultant support time for the client, and coverage of anti-infective-related content at two conferences.

A team of three London-based consultants at GlobalData, with support from the back office in Hyderabad, India, was created to provide expert support to the client’s team. The output was well-received and the CI tracking was renewed for the following year.

For more information on how GlobalData’s competitive intelligence can give you valuable insights that help your company to get ahead, please download the whitepaper below.