Most new products launched fail. Even successful ones build their share over many years. This is a story of a product that became the market leader with an 18% market share within a year. It was based on a strategy underpinned by insights developed through the combinatorial power of ethnography, psychology and machine learning. Furthermore, it grew the market along with another brand by 20%.

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For context, the product was a natural treatment for HPV, a viral infection passed through skin-to-skin contact. It is detected at a Pap smear test. Positive tests mean that women have the infection or cervical lesions have begun to form. Women then enter long periods of tests, either ‘waiting and seeing’ or getting treated. For treatment, there are natural products and/or surgery. The license to market the product in the country of interest was acquired from another company.

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Here, we have summarised certain lessons on insights used for rapid impact.

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So what was the secret to such rapid sales and growth?

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1. Conviction that insight is central to substantial business impact. The first time we were briefed by the client’s senior team, the country head of business said to us, “Let’s show our partners what a big difference distinctive insights can make to a launch.” That set the tone of the entire project. In subsequent problem solving sessions, the ambitious overarching question was “How do we develop the strategy and tactics to gain market leadership? ” This was based on a hypothesis that women are suffering in this condition without a product that met their unmet need. The framing of the overarching question translated to a searching mindset. This encouraged each team member to actively seek opportunities to add value to the women and physicians throughout the research.
    

2. Combinatorial power of multiple insights approaches - ethnography, depth interviews, quantitative research, psychology, and machine learning - to develop launch effective actions. Ethnography revealed the extent of anxiety and suffering that the women experienced, and often how they misinterpreted what the doctor said, e.g., the doctor would say “It’s easy to catch” and that would cue, “So it must be easy to pass on?” This was used to develop a tool to improve the doctor–patient conversation.  The quantitative research helped us spot a specific group that saw real value in natural treatments. A machine learning algorithm identified the most defining characteristics of such women in a manner that was superior to traditional regression approaches due to certain non-linear patterns in the data. These insights are being used to inform their digital marketing, and to help doctors understand who would value the treatment. One of the important predictors was “locus of control” - a construct related to self-efficacy that the psychologist in our team introduced.  The entire launch communication for physicians and patients was based on the insights from the different methods. Having the same individuals who were adept at business problem solving, and hands-on in multiple technical areas, e.g., moderating ethnography and running machine learning algorithms, accelerated the development of effective insights.
    

3.  Seamless and cross-functional working amongst client and agency members. Every product launch involves decisions to be taken by different internal functions (e.g., marketing, sales, medical, regulatory), and working with supporting agencies. Seamless working makes the process efficient and improves the quality of the decisions. This was the approach adopted for the project. For instance, the client and our team learnt about the new therapy, its mechanism of action, and all the science and evidence, simultaneously rather than the client holding a separate briefing for us. Each problem solving session had members from the marketing, sales, medical team, and the agency members. One of the best indicators of seamlessness in working is when the source of powerful insights and recommended actions could be any member of the client and agency teams. Such was the nature of the collaboration.
    

4. Women at the heart of the work. The entire strategy and insights plan was conceived to keep the woman at the heart of the work. Both the ethnography and the quantitative research was designed to reveal their journey with the condition, the unmet needs, the emotions they experienced, the different coping mechanisms, and the interactions with healthcare professionals.
    

5. Courage to selectively use insights to pursue a vision-led strategy. The vision for this product was to serve the women’s unmet need. Whilst we conducted our in-depth interviews with physicians, we learnt there are varied mental models and practices about the condition. It would have been quite tempting to optimise the launch plans and communication to different groups of physicians. Instead, our client decided to take a leadership position and based the entire strategy on what women really wanted. A simple illustration is that physicians were concerned about “abnormal lesions” whilst women were anxious about “freedom from HPV”. The brand was developed around the latter aspect.   

 

We presented this case at the ESOMAR Congress 2019. The detailed article can be downloaded from the link below: https://ana.esomar.org/documents/rapid-impact