Tips on writing a competitor analysis for your pharmaceutical brand plan

Most marketers keep a close eye on their brand and their competitors' brands, but what about the competitor's corporate activities themselves?

Keeping an eye on your competitors brand and corporate activities, such as a competitor analysis, can help you make better assumptions for what may come in the future, therefore give you an edge to come up with a more impactful strategic direction.

- Prescription, sales and unit share

- Promotional spend / share-of-voice per tactic (ie. advertising, sales force, continuing medical education, direct-to-consumer advertising, public relations, samples, etc...)

- Product monograph changes

- Price changes

- Patent expiry and potential generic entries

- Line extension, either with a complementary product or a new format

- Creative and tagline changes

- Message changes

- Where is their national head office and global head office? Sometimes pharmaceutical companies will associate themselves with KOL's nearest to their corporate head offices.

- What is the largest revenue brand for the company? Typically, there is greater focus on the company's largest brand. By knowing this, you can keep track of surges or downfalls of that large brand and make assumptions of how this will impact the focus and budget for remaining brands.

- What other products do they promote? Are these products in the same therapeutic area as the competitie product?

- Do they have any products in the pipeline? If so, is this new product estimated to be a big seller for the company? If so, what type of impact could this have on the sales force structure, on the promotional spend for the existing products?

- Their sales force structure. Do they have only 1 sales force detailing all of their brands, or several sales forces with different brand priorities, or even several sales forces with overlapping brand priorities?

- Their promotional habits may be predictable from year to year. Some corporations are big spenders in the first and second quarter of the year then implement limited tactics afterwards until the following year.