Pharma Strategy Blog

Simplifying data capture and blog post workflow

Recently, I've had a lot of enquiries as to how I manage to write so many blog posts, either in terms of finding the time or staying current.

The answer is simple - I use tools to help simplify and minimise the effort involved.  You could also use this kind of web 2.0 approach for creating a database and tracking data, intelligence, keeping current if you work in the Pharma or Biotech industry, whether a scientist, a marketer or a PR professional.  Of course, you could spend hours Googling stuff or reading a few health sites online, but there are other ways to stay ahead of the pack.

The key parameters at play here can be summarised:

• Gather data
• Process and understand information
• Perform analysis
• Generate Insights

Far too many people often only do the first two tasks, but without analysis and insights, the data means very little.  So what are the tools of my trade?

1. Evernote

I've talked about Evernote in the past, which is a nifty data capture tool we use daily here at Icarus Consultants. They have both free and premium versions to suit everyone's pocket. 

When starting projects, we clip relevant information from the internet into a new Evernote Notebook and gather it all in one place. You can use a desktop or a smart phone for this task and dump as much information as you like into it for later searching. This makes it easier to digest when looking at the big picture and gathering ideas and seeing trends.  You can also search your own database for existing information, which is very useful for blog posts or writing reports around a topic.

I often create and write blog posts in Evernote too.  The research information is already there and it's straightforward to use the editor as well, as backing up and synchronising the information across multiple platforms.  We've all written something in Word or a Blog Editor and lost the content >.< but l have found Evernote more reliable for saving information, which can then be cut/paste with minimal editing into the Blog platform or Office for reports. I also have a bunch of articles, reports and blog posts that get part drafted and finished later, acting as a useful repository for gathering ideas.

Other good uses? Need some information on the road while talking to someone? A quick search in the app my iPhone will usually bring it up.

The other side of the coin is generating and gathering data. I've mentioned that you can clip research to an app such as Evernote on the go, but I also have a LOT of information in RSS, whether it be news items, feeds for the latest articles in tens of cancer and science journals, blogs from a variety of sources, rss alerts by topic or keyword etc. Keeping track of this huge volume of information used to be unwieldy. 

2. My 6 Sense

One tool I really love and have been using for a while is My 6 Sense.  This cool app takes all the rss feeds from my Google Reader, which is clumsy and awkward to read, and processes them into a more manageable fashion.  

Several times a day I can check the app on my iPhone and see what's new or relevant.  Over time the app algorithms learn what your particular interests are and creates a page of what it considers to be useful items of interest in your RSS feeds via the Relevance tab or as they come in (the Time tab) as shown below (left photo).  

Data is social, though; it cries out to be shared with others. The M6S app allows you to add social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook etc and share any interesting items with your friends or colleagues too. Here, you can also see the items from my shared stream (right photo) as an example of what I found interesting and streamed to others to read:

br>

Over time, as you use the app more, it gets much better at predicting what you like or may find interesting. One thing I miss from the M6S app is a Search button - what happens if I want to find a bunch of interesting articles in my RSS database on a given topic, eg PI3K or something similar? At the moment, there's no obvious way to do that as far as I can tell, but it would certainly be really useful to me.

3. SimpleNote

I confess that after years of losing data unexpectedly, I've become a bot of a plain text geek. On my Macs, TextEdit was something I use daily, especially when taking notes from market research interviews on the fly. Then one day, someone mentioned SimpleNote, which is a beautifully simple yet flexible tool for gathering text notes.

For some months now, I've been using the App on my iPhone, which allows me to jot down ideas, tasks, notes to self etc on the fly... essentially simple notes.

Then recently, I realised that the free iPhone app also gave me access to the desktop app, which opens up a whole new world of utility and practicality.  Here was something that could help me do multiple things efficiently:

• Research and find interesting journal articles or news about say, PI3-kinase in My 6 Sense
• Email article links to self via iPhone
• On desktop, cut/paste multiple snippets of information to SimpleNote
• Search SimpleNote for older articles
• Write blog post in SimpleNote
• Cut/paste blog post to TypePad for posting
• Sync selected information with DropBox and read from any computer later

Take a look at the snapshot below for the basic SimpleNote concept:

You can see how neat and intuitive this is at first glance and how easy it is to find information, whether it be data or contact information or even the reference link months after clipping it by scrolling down in an individual note:

The DOI is really useful because when I blog about journal articles, I only have to cut/paste the DOI into the Research Blogging site and it generates a nifty bit of code that provides easy access to the article via a link for anyone interested in it.

Over time, I diligently put in tonnes of stuff into these tools, whether Evernote or SimpleNote and they come in very handy for research for blog posts and consulting reports. Essentially, I find that I tend to use Evernote for web clipping and SimpleNote for text processing.

Of course, the short answer to the blogging question is you either get more efficient and smarter at gathering, processing, analysing and generating insights or you work longer hours.  Being a good European, I'd rather work smarter and hope that people appreciate the insights generated either in the blog posts here or in client report :-).

What are your favourite tools and apps that make a difference to your daily workflow?

Using technology to derive Sentiments Analysis in Pharma

This week offers a nice break in science topics on the blog and a chance to look at how technology can be used to monitor social media, physician and patient sentiments about drugs and various diseases in a practical way.  I've been interested in analysing trends in data since my undergraduate days when I created the first automated computerised football (soccer) notation system for looking at strategies and tactics employed by winning and losing teams.  

There's a LOT of blah blah talk about social media out there, in particular from self styled gurus and experts, which tends to make me tune out for the most part.  In my spare time (away from being immersed in preclinical and clinical data), what I'm really interested in is how mathematical algorithms can be applied to speech and words using modern computer techniques to extract feeling, tone and meaning from sentiments in meaningful ways.

After yesterday's 5 minute Lightening Talk at the Sentiments Analysis Symposium in New York hosted by Seth Grimes of Alta Plana, I received a few requests for the presentation, entitled "Next generation sentiment extraction: light at the end of the tunnel, but will it negate the need for human supervision?" 

So here it is for those interested:

Using Sentiment Analysis in Pharma and Biotech

View more presentations from maverickny.

The file is downloadable and I'm pleased to say that the quality is much better than reading it in Slideshare online, which may look a little fuzzy.  

I managed to do the brief presentation with 10 seconds to spare. There nothing worse than getting half way through and the buzzer goes before you get to the interesting bits!

If anyone wants any further information, please feel free to contact me. We have several interesting projects ongoing with sentiments analysis in oncology at the moment.

Next week normal service will resume and I will be busy reporting on hot science and research topics at the American Association of Cancer Research Meeting in DC, as they have kindly offered Pharma Strategy Blog a science blogger pass and an opportunity to bring new developments in science and cancer biology to life here. Watch this space!

Learnings from #ePharma conference

This week I attended the ePharma conference in Philadelphia and thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to catch up with Twitter buddies for some extended conversation and sharing of news and views. 

One of the challenges of Twitter is that it is hard to have extended discussions around topics of interest, which Friendfeed does very well, except that hardly anyone outside of tech or science geeks is on Friendfeed.  It was therefore really delightful to meet the regulars in the digital pharma space in person at the intimate gathering on Moshulu, kindly hosted by Pixels and Pills.  Lot's of interesting conversations evolved and set the tone for a productive conference.

Having heard from several folks that 2009 was a quiet one for pharma digital conferences, it was a big surprise to see this one packed to the gills.  Many of the attendees were from eMarketing departments, digital agencies or specialist groups. 

Clearly the buzz about social media is beginning to gain momentum in Pharmaland, but there is also a sense of frustration with lack of guidelines and the conservatism of internal review committees.  I couldn't help wondering if they were preaching to the converted; what would be nice is to see more brand marketers, legal and reulatory folks attend to learn more and gain comfort around what others are doing in the space.

Rather than do a review of all the sessions, as I'm sure others will do that most admirably, I going to look at a couple of concepts and trends that appealed to me.

Over the last couple of years, video has become a firm mainstay in the general public's imagination, largely as prices have come down for things like Flip cameras and with the ease of posting and sharing videos via platforms such as YouTube, Vimeo, Viddler etc virally through social media.  In the opening session, Paul Ivans from the organisers, IIR, pointed out that:

"Video accounts 34% of time people are online. But for health information, people want to read it."

Do they?  Or is it that the videos on health and medical information aren't yet in a digestible, easily understood level? Videos on Pharma channels get very low views, so this could be a reflection of general distrust about corporate Pharma, lack of viral marketing or disinterest in the information.  Ultimately, more granular research is needed to understand patient and consumer needs before things improve. 

The neat thing about video such as YouTube though, is that it is seamless on smart phones such as the iPhone or Droid.  If you have a YouTube video on your site or someone shares a link to a YouTube with you on Twitter or via email, clicking the play button or link takes you straight into YouTube to see it on your screen and allow you to share it with others if you like it.  More and more people are surfing the web on their smartphones, making mobile an important and rapidly growing aspect of marketing.  People are social creatures, they want to share something easily with their friends or relatives.

Recently, I've noticed how many brand or comporate sites are not optimised for mobile.  There's a great opportunity to improve your image right there.  It's relatively easy to do and yet has a huge impact.  Imagine how many doctors are searching for medical information daily on their smartphones while in a hospital?  Or a patient and friend are in the hospital waiting for tests having just been told by the doctor he/she has X.  One is in shock, the other starts to Google on their iPhone for basic information.  We've all been there.  Ivans went on to say:

"Digital marketing provides health information and support to consumers and HCPs, but Mobile unlocks the opportunity for improving outcomes."

Of course, the wags will chirp, "there's an app for that!" but after the diagnosis, researching the disease, treatments, side effect management etc, improved patient outcomes are indeed what the ultimate goal is for everyone.  The brands and companies that really start to understand and focus on this aspect of education are the ones that will do well in the long term.  It won't be easy though, because it takes a) deep understanding of the disease and patient needs and b) focused strategies rather than random and haphazard tactics.

Another theme I liked at this meeting was innovation.  Dennis Urbaniak from sanofi-aventis (a client company) emphasised strongly that innovation is not creativity or shiny object syndrome.  That was music to my ears - how many of us have sat through agency meetings hearing about about some new idea or tactic that they thought 'very creative/innovative/cool (substitute words of your choice)' and you're deep down you're really wondering,

"Hmmm yes, but what impact will it have, how will it help doctors/patients/advocacy groups (or whatever is the target audience), how will it change outcomes?  How does it fit in with our overall strategy and goals?  Does it integrate well and can it scale?  It might be pretty and win an award, but what if the target group doesn't find it useful? Then it's money down the drain."

Therein is the rub that Dennis was alluding to that marketers constantly wonder about: "is it relevant?" and offered 5 smart rules to live by:

1. Understand no matter how hard you try, you canʼt read your customerʼs minds. Donʼt pretend to.
2. Optimise your mix at the customer level not the brand level.
3. Respect channel preference and channel response, equally.
4. Apply predictive analytics as the foundation of your approach.
5. Content remains king. Channel optimization gets you in the game. Content optimization drives sustainable performance.

These ideas tally well with my own experience - broad ideas and tailored messages based on customer needs across multiple platforms always work better than isolated tactics with one set of messages on one channel, yet many marketers spend a lot of time and money trying to read customer's minds instead of gathering insights and using more intuition to make a bigger impact.  They forget that what people think they want today may be very different tomorrow.

In the end, great content is king, not tools and channels.  Relevance is ultimately about finding the tricky balance between expressed customer preferences and what people respond to.  How does this all fit together?  Urbaniak nailed it when he finished with:

"Let customers pick what they want and measure outcomes, then optimise progams accordingly." 

In other words, be clear on your true intent but let the customer drive the direction.  Predict, Project and Validate.

For many in Pharmaland senior management though, if they are insecure or unenlightened control freaks that might well be a very scary thought but new technologies are rapidly changing the landscape about how we communicate and interact.  We can adapt and change with them or die of ignorance.

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There's an App for that!

Happy New Year, everyone!

One of the things I really noticed in 2009 was the growth of useful apps that really made a difference to my daily life.

Getting an iPhone was the first step towards not only improved productivity in the office and on the road, but also in how I manage myelf.

For example, I used SimpleNote a lot to jot down ideas and quotes at meetings. A camera can be used to take snapshots of scientific posters etc. This is really useful if you do CI work, for example, and need to discuss things with clients.

Two other apps I used for my personal life included RunKeeper and LoseIt. The first tracks my exercise routes and tells me how far I've walked or run and approximately how many calories have been expended. The second helped me manage my daily food choices and calorific intake. Together, they helped me lose 20lbs in 2009.

Now imagine what other health and educational apps could be created for people with all sorts of needs. How about a transfuion app, for example, that calculates how much blood and iron you are adding over time. This would be relevant to many patients across a variety of different diseases because the body cannot remove the iron added. Too much is bad for you and will deposit on internal organs unless removed. Helping the empowered patient track this themselves would be a nifty little app.

Of course, there are many other examples that the Pharma companies could create and involve patients and doctors in the design process.

2010 may well be a good time to start developing better education tools that have a real impact on patients lives.

What apps would you like to see developed?

Between the Lines - Proto Magazine - Massachusetts General Hospital

By using language- and pattern-analyzing software to search and distill the cascade of words on social networking sites, researchers may be able to identify trends and signals, such as repeated mentions of a certain drug in connection with a particular side effect or treatment success. “Listening” to thousands of patients as they discuss treatments, side effects and experiences with their diseases might even help scientists come up with hypotheses worthy of study. “There’s a tremendous amount that goes on in a patient’s daily life,” says Frank Moss, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, an emerging-technologies research group that helped create one disease-related networking site, and a founder of the cancer drug company Infinity Pharmaceuticals. “They’re trying off-label drugs, different diets, different exercise, different lifestyles. That information isn’t easily available to clinicians, but the cure to the disease may lie within it.”

via protomag.com

This is an excerpt from the Massachusetts General Hospital quarterly magazine, Protomag, which you can also read online, via the link above.

The article isn't just about data mining, but also about how patients can connect and converse about their disease through forums as well as the dangers of social media sites that are unchecked by authorities (viz the FDA).

The 'deep web' as Gilles Frydman described it in the comments to the recent post on this blog about the FDA, social media and patients, has both advantages and disadvantages. One the one hand, it is a great resource for people needing advice from others with the same condition and on the other, it can be a fertile ground for misinformation and unscientific data with no substance or rigour.

Check out the full article in Protomag, it's well worth reading.

Posted via web from sally church's posterous

Survey of readers and followers in Pharma, Science and Healthcare

The other day Fred Wilson's venture capital blog alerted me to a cool new way of surveying people based on 25 short (and quick) multiple choice answers about yourself.

Bearing in mind that many of the readers of this blog or people I interact with on Twitter and Friendfeed are from the Pharma and Biotech  or healthcare industries, I thought it would be fun to test the Hunch tool out here and crowdsource some information about our little sector.

The answers are totally anonymous and aggregated.

Here's the survey, just click the Hunch link to get started:

Powered by Hunch.com

When you have finished, please let others know and spread the word! The more people we have doing the survey, the more robust the answers will be. I'll post an update of the aggregated results at the end of the week.

What Percentage of Physicians Communicate Online With Patients? | iHealthBeat

What Percentage of Physicians Communicate Online With Patients?

July 03, 2008
 

In 2008, 36% of U.S. physicians reported communicating with patients online, up from 31% in 2007, according to a survey by Manhattan Research.

Twenty-five percent of physicians reported communicating with patients via the Internet in 2006, compared with 24% of doctors in 2005.

The survey found that physicians are more active when it comes to new media than the average consumer. For example, 83% of doctors watch video clips online, compared with 34% of all U.S. adults.

The survey also found that physicians who use online communities such as Sermo and Medscape Connect are more likely to be primary care physicians, female and slightly younger than the average physician. In addition, they are more likely to own a PDA or smart phone and go online during or between patient visits.

Results are based on a Q1 2008 nationally representative survey of 1,832 practicing U.S. physicians.

Source: Manhattan Research

via manhattanresearch.com

And then there was a headline I saw recently, to the effect that "Physician Smartphone Adoption Rate to Reach 81% in 2012."

Hard to see how they reach 81% based on the Manhattan Research report from last year and none of the PCP's or NP's in my physician practice appear to use one actively, other than an ancient Palm device for checking prescription information and sending new Rx's to the chemist.

Academic oncologists, however, always seem to have the latest gadgets and cool tools judging from some recent conferences I attended. Last week I asked some what their favourite gadget was.  Universally it was a flash key, they can never get enough of those, it seems.

Most of the community oncologists I've seen recently at meetings, however, were still on old cell phones and desktop computers, not the shiny Macs and Blackberries preferred by the academic doctors.

They all thought my iPhone was a really cool tool though, especially the medical apps such as ePocrates and Medscape for looking up drug information.

Several companies were still handing out those little cancer regimen books. They're really useful, but what a missed opportunity to offer a free downloadable app with all the relevant information in it via a PDA though.

Posted via web from sally church's posterous

Nerve Growth Factor: an interesting new treatment approach for glaucoma

A recent paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences  by scientists from the University of Rome has shown that the administration of nerve growth factor (NGF) stabilizes or reduces the damage to the optic nerve caused by the raised intra-ocular pressure (IOP) associated with glaucoma. 

Glaucoma is an eye disease that is the world’s leading cause of blindness affecting 77 million people around the world and causes irreversible damage to vision.  An easy to use eye drop that stabilizes or reduces damage to retinal ganglion cells and the optic nerve cells offers exciting potential and is research that will be watched closely by companies with an ophthalmology portfolio.

NGF was discovered by Stanley Cohen and Rita Levi-Montalcini, who received the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physiology.  NGF may have a neuroprotective and repair function within the body, which could explain its ability to stabilize nerve damage caused by raised IOP. 

In the paper published by Bonini and Levi-Monalcini they administered eye drops with NGF to rats and three human subjects.  This caused an reduction in retinal ganglion cell death in the rats, and the patients who received NGF had improvements in their visual field and visual acuity. 

The data is extremely promising, but in view of the small subject numbers and the fact that rat models do not always translate into humans, more extensive clinical trials data are needed to validate it as a potential new treatment. 

Hopefully more data will be available for presentation at the ARVO (Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology) annual meeting in May next year.

Lambiase, A., Aloe, L., Centofanti, M., Parisi, V., Mantelli, F., Colafrancesco, V., Manni, G., Bucci, M., Bonini, S., & Levi-Montalcini, R. (2009). Experimental and clinical evidence of neuroprotection by nerve growth factor eye drops: Implications for glaucoma Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0906678106

Sofroniew MV, Howe CL, & Mobley WC (2001). Nerve growth factor signaling, neuroprotection, and neural repair. Annual review of neuroscience, 24, 1217-81 PMID: 11520933

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Interested in Pharma market research?

We regularly conduct market research for our Pharma, Biotech & Medical Device clients by telephone or email.  Often, products in development, new indications or initial market entries require some quick customer feedback that helps guide and direct a larger study or provide new insights for their strategic planning process.  The products being tested made involve drugs, vaccines, devices or new technology approaches.

If you are a physician or surgeon and would like to participate in these studies, do email us and let us know your contact details, specialty and sub-specialty.  All information is kept confidential and all doctors receive an honoraria for any work undertaken.  We are always looking for new perspectives or people with experience in different areas.

All research is aggregated and anonymised; there is no link to individuals but quotes may be used (anonymously) to illustrate points in a report.

Not all our research is US focused, so we are particularly keen to build up our contacts in other countries for our global clients. 

If you would like to participate, drop us a line today; we look forward to hearing from you!

Subscribe to Pharma Strategy Blog by Email

What does Icarus Consultants do?

While in the UK last week, several people asked me what we do here at Icarus Consultants.  Rather than say that we are a marketing strategy company, I simply said we were in the business of 'actionable insights'.  That got their attention and an interesting conversation ensued about what it involved.  Now, normally on this blog we tend to talk about interesting ideas and disease concepts or conference updates, but I thought it was worth explaining a little more about what we do for once.

You can group the concept of actionable insights into 5 main areas:

1) Landscape opportunity assessments - around diseases, types of therapeutics etc
2) Competitive intelligence - KIQ's, tracking, conference coverage
3) Social Media monitoring - stakeholder analysis, buzz metrics, sentiments
4) Market surveillance - competitor and market monitoring of competitors in development
5) Market entry strategies - for companies looking to enter the North American market

The goal is to gather, process and analyse huge amounts of information that enables a brand team to develop new insights and make appropriate strategic or tactical changes for their brand.

The neat thing about this rigorous process is that it:

a) Is highly flexible because you can mix 'n match in a modular fashion to achieve your brand or company goals
b) May involve primary or secondary data collection
c) Can include patients, HCP, KOL or market opinions and research on sentiments about a topic, a brand or a disease, for example.
d) Can be adapted by different clients eg senior management, market research, competitive intelligence, marketing, strategic planning, PR or social media people.

What can it be used for?

i) New products in development
ii) Marketed or mature products
iii) Partnership deals (new market entry)
iv) Licensing evaluations
v) Corporate/brand reputation

How do we gather data?

1) Primary research - interview based
2) Secondary research - we have a huge proprietary database of clinical, scientific and market information we can search
3) Web 2.0 tools - rich variety available for datamining
4) Social media monitoring - using proprietary webcrawlers and custom databases
5) Conference coverage - a great way to keep up to date with the latest clinical and scientific information

In short, we tend to work with senior management, project teams or different department with focused customer goals to find real insights to enable brand strategies to be driven.  Once client see the possibilities, they love the flexibility of the approach, the quality of the strategic reports and come back for more or refer us to their friends.  That's a rather nice endorsement and certainly keeps us very busy! 

A typical question we get is "we'd like to gather some information on X, but we're stuck and wondered if you could help us?"  If you're one of those people stuck in analysis by paralysis and need help, pick up the phone and give us a call (201 204 9210).  We're here to help and if we can't, we can usually suggest someone who can.

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The impact of social media on Pharma

This short and simple Slideshare story tells a wonderful parable that could be just as true for Pharma and Biotech, as it is for big and small business.  As more and more people use the internet creatively in the Digital Age, things are a-changing:

Corporate Life

View more Microsoft Word documents from Thiago S.

The moral of the story?   Adapt to change or die. 

Do your research and figure out how to survive in the new Digital Age.  There are plenty of new tools out there to help with this.  Imagine you can listen to customer and consumer sentiments about your brand in real time.... scary or fun?


 

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Eye for Pharma - some interesting meetings this month

It is a bit of a shock to realise that this is my 200th blog post and 25,000 views since the first one, how time flies!

This month sees a couple of really interesting conferences that I'll be attending, Twittering and live blogging.  Both are from Eye for Pharma.  The first one is on March 18-19th in Princeton and will cover the 2nd Global Business Intelligence Summit meeting, including areas such as drug pipelines, emerging markets and the global economic downturn.

A number of industry speakers in the competitive intelligence field will be speaking on key topics including representatives from Merck, sanofi-aventis, Amgen, Wyeth, Bayer, Genzyme and Shire among others.  It looks to be a very topical and interesting conference overall.

The second meeting I'm looking forward to covering live is also from Eye for Pharma, this time the first Oncology Summit from Boston on March 30-31.  Topics covered include a range of subjects from product commercialisation strategies, regulatory environment, reimbursement, pricing and market access.

I've already interviewed Steve Heller from Johnson & Johnson on how biomarkers can influence and add value to the new product commercialisation of cancer drugs and will be posting the interview here on the blog this week, so watch this space.

Excellence and success

"People at the top don't just work harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder."

"Excellence at performing a complex task requires a critical minimum of practice."

Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers

"The emerging picture from such studies is that 10,000 hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world class expert - in anything."

Daniel Levitin, Neurologist

The importance of messaging in new product launches

What is messaging and why is it important? 

Well, in this context, it is essentially a communication about a company's product(s) or even the pharma/biotechnology company itself.  It takes the form of either the written word or verbal communications about data or a product's features.  These can be from employees of the manufacturer, the press, patients, caregivers, members of the public or doctors. 

From a company's perspective, having everyone on the same hymn sheet across promotion, PR and medical education is the desired goal, but few achieve this nirvana mainly because it is constantly like herding cats and requires an enormous amount of confidence, energy and effort, although it can be done.  The marketers nightmare is realising that there are different messages from the sales force, key opinion leaders and company press releases.  This limits the effectiveness of the overall message and ultimately will lead to confused and unsure patients and doctors.

The most successful brands are often those with a coherent, cogent and potent message that convey the essential essence of the product in a few simple words.  Rarely do you see a successful brand with poor messaging, but brands with poor messaging generally do less well.  Gleevec and Avastin are two recent blockbuster cancer drugs that spring to mind as examples of utilising effective messaging strategies to generate share of voice.  Constantly referring to new data, new clinical trials and extended survival of patients in the earlier trials adds to the body of evidence that the drugs are safe and effective.

The other side of the coin is that smart companies continually evaluate their competitors messaging and the intentions that they signal in the process.  This is competitive intelligence at its best; honing and refining your brand to best take advantage in a highly competitive market, so that you can proactively respond to your rivals rather than react six or nine months later down the line as you assess the market data.  Often by then it is too late and momentum has been lost. 

Another example would be an existing brand on the market and a new competitor is due out in the same indication; what can be done to effectively limit their market share?  Information about competitor messaging can be gleaned from press releases, conference data, online forums, key opinion leader research, third party medical education etc. 

Using these in-depth strategic analyses, brand teams can better understand the competitor positioning and message signalling in order to put in place their own effective brand strategy to defend their market.  Two recent examples of this were Gleevec (Novartis) in the CML market, which effectively limited Sprycel's (BMS) penetration while extending it's own in other indications and ImClone's Erbitux, which continued to grow it's revenues across several indications in the face of stiff competition from Amgen's Vectibix.

How companies position themselves and their portfolio is also important - Genentech's success with Herceptin, Rituxan and Avastin was no mean feat.  Each drug and new indication added not only new data, but also a clear message that monoclonal antibodies worked and were here to stay.  Contrast that with the experiences of the vaccine companies during the same period.

Messaging then, is not only important to brands already on the market but also to new products in development and company portfolios.  Getting the messages right is partly about leveraging your data, but also one of simplicity, especially if you have several drugs targeting the same tumour type, for example.  How should they be differentiated?  Is the messaging to customers clear and explicit?  It is a partly art and partly science; in oncology at least, it is important to understand the science and biology of the disease, the competitor set you are competing against and having the boldness of imagination to execute a strategy well.

At Icarus Consultants we advise companies on brand messaging, competitor messaging signals, how to work with key opinion leaders to maximise messaging and for companies with a portfolio of products, evolving a messaging strategy to take to avoid confusion between the brands.  After all, it's all about driving peak sales as fast as possible.

Treating cancer should be a last resort for society

"The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what you don't like, and do what you'd rather not."

Mark Twain

Sensible advice indeed, but how many Americans actually follow that wise and sage advice?  As the baby boomer population ages, health and wealth become issues very much to the fore.  The burden on society to pay for years of poor choices and idle, corpulent lifestyles will be significant.  There is still time to act, but the task will be very much like turning a huge battleship in a narrow river; tricky and fraught with challenges.

It's always interesting reading about those in Asian, Indian or African countries moving to the West and learning that their children develop diseases more typically associated with the new land - cardiovascular, obesity, autoimmune and cancer in particular.  Can we learn something from this? 

It tells us that the Western lifestyle, exercise, diet and stress all play a part in contributing to the widespread problem, but for all the education and information out there, nothing really changes.  The number of people it affects is actually quite small in reality.

Plus ça chânge, plus de la même chose.

If you look at poorer countries, the incidence of breast, lung prostate and colorectal cancers are all lower compared to the West.  Cervical cancer is much higher, but now that a vaccine is available, we may one day see the gradual eradication of HPV in populations where it is a major issue.  There are no vaccines for poor lifestyle choices though.

The solution?  Well, I don't have any grand ideas or suggestions for broad Government schemes that will duly flop through lack of impact.

Instead, I'm taking personal responsibility for my own health and lifestyle and getting my emotional wealth and sanity back.  Yup, I bought a new pair of running shoes this week, time to get out on my bike and get some exercise.  I don't smoke, drink in moderation but have got lazy running my own small  business and it's time to get back my health through sensible exercise.

“So many people spend their health gaining wealth, and then have to spend their wealth to regain their health.”

A.J. Reb Materi

Think about it - prevention is better than cure. 

For most cancers there is no cure unless it is detected early enough and surgery is a viable option.  By the time someone is diagnosed with stage IV cancer, the prospects will be pretty bleak.  Not all cancers are lifestyle related, you can get mutations through hereditary means and  genetic changes through natural aging.  There is no doubt that eating and drinking less, exercising more, and not smoking will probably help you in the long run.  Life is too short to spend it being ill or unwell.

Your health is your responsibility - time, once used, is gone for ever.