Helping a medical device company to retain market share in the face of patent expiration

Problem context

Our client, a US based medical device company with a first-to-market innovation, was facing an imminent patent expiration with the launch of generic options likely in the coming years. While some believed that the strength of the brand would protect their share, others in the company saw the threat as more real and anticipated erosion if innovation was not forthcoming.

The engineering and marketing teams needed help to make some important decisions.

To what extent should they invest in new innovations and what specific features should they focus on?
What would drive value perceptions among users and purchasers, and what would merely be seen as ‘nice to haves’?
What new features would stop them moving to a generic option?

With these questions in mind, we developed a plan that allowed the need for the potential new innovations to be surfaced in an exploratory manner, before assessing their value quantitatively.

Our approach

To tackle the question at hand, a multi-staged approach was devised:

Initial exploratory qualitative interviews with nurses and physicians in the UK, Germany, US, South Korea and Japan: The work began with 11 deep qualitative interviews with users of the devices. In the interview we encouraged the respondents to speak openly about their experiences with the product.
Refinement of potential new features: The input from the qualitative stage helped to develop a final set of features that, based on the users’ experience, we believed had the potential to improve the experience and command a price premium
Choice-based conjoint to prioritise features: In order to quantitatively assess the value of the new features we conducted an online study with 300 users.

Once the final set of features had been agreed on, we spoke to a number of ‘heads of departments’ who were responsible for the buying decisions. This enabled us to sense check the findings and assess the likelihood to invest more in a new version of the product.

Insights

Our findings challenged many of the pre-existing beliefs and gave clear direction of which innovations should be pursued.

Impact

The insights were pivotal in providing strategic direction for the product’s development, including:

Confirmation of a need for innovation in the light of a weaker than expected brand equity
A clear prioritisation of which features should be developed
Confidence to pursue product development based on feedback from users and heads of departments
Guidance on how to communicate the value of the new innovations