The Power of Persuasion: Gaining Insight into

Market Intelligence and Influencers

By Co-Founders Bonnie Rishell, CEO and

Archie Anderson, Vice President

ROI²

Are you looking to:

•  Enter the market with a new product—but don’t understand the market?

•  Expand your market share in an existing market – but see signs of weakening market

 share and need new data sets to be more competitive?

•  Roll out a new indication for existing product?

•  Reach a new audience for your current product?

•  Reposition your product in light of new market shifts, waning market share or

 competitors on the horizon?

ROI2 can help.

In the world of marketing and medical education, getting your marketing strategy right–the first time–can spell the difference between success and failure. With more factors involved in the decision-making process, increased competition, greater sophistication in parsing market intelligence, and more at stake than ever before, companies are looking for new ways to leverage their data to increase their chances of recognition, acceptance, uptake and utilization.            

            Marketing success today depends on the ability to identify, extract, analyze and synthesize business intelligence. Prolink, ROI²’s parent company, has years of experience in providing business intelligence solutions to leading corporations in finance, communications and media. Recognizing the value of these intelligence tools to pharmaceutical companies, ROI² was created to help pharmaceutical companies gather, analyze and utilize data to pinpoint their messages, marketing initiatives and brand strategies. By combining the company’s innovative technology and ability to capture business intelligence with pharmaceutical marketing expertise, ROI² has developed a proprietary platform that allows pharmaceutical companies to increase the likelihood of brand adoption and success.

            Offering a wide range of services—including consultation, product and market analysis, market and brand strategy evaluation, KOL Identification and influence mapping—ROI² delivers business intelligence unmatched by any other company today. Our board includes experts in all areas of the field: highly respected physicians, industry analysts, senior executives in pharmaceutical companies, FDA and other governmental advisors. Working with you every step of the way, these specialists help us bring you the data needed by every member of your team, from product and brand management through the marketing and sales sides. We help analyze your product, competition, target audiences, position and market strategies, and understand the factors—and people—who influence brand adoption. Starting with the basics, we look at:

            Where are you in the market—pre- or post-launch, for example—and what kinds of data sets you need? Who do you need to reach? Who and where are they? Using analytics and surveys to gain insights into the right influencers, we help determine your positioning, sales and influence strategies.       

            Recognizing that gaining insight into the dynamics of influence networks is likely to have a measurable impact on product adoption, ROI² develops intelligence about the anatomy of individual influence networks, providing insights that support marketing and sales management efforts to generate brand adoption within key target audiences. Such information includes identification of the thought leaders you need to reach, particularly at the regional and local level; how they compare with others in the field; who are the most respected authors, speakers, clinical investigators in the category—by region; what institutions are they affiliated with—and which institutions are most respected? What are their preferred treatment protocols? How do they like to get their information—through medical journals, medical education meetings, presentations or sales reps? 

And we don’t stop there. We look at trends. Past data sets. Key factors that drive influence and promote brand adoption. And much more.

KOL Identification and Influence Mapping

ROI² uses three approaches to identify peer-selected opinion leaders and the networks of physicians they influence: the bottom-up method, the top-down method, and profiling. The bottom-up method involves surveying a large sample of high-prescriber target physicians and looking for clear patterns that suggest leadership within a given network. Generally, when specific physicians are identified over and over as a key influential force, they emerge as thought leaders. The top-down approach involves searching the medical literature to identify top authors, surveying them, and essentially coming up with “the top of the top.” Finally, profiling provides a constantly updated reference to the leading KOLs that includes their participation in medical journals, clinical trials, events, medical associations, medical education, scientific contributions, pharmaceutical company relationships and more.   

The value of influence data lies in its precision. Our maps, for example, clearly show that within any influence network, multiple centers of gravity and webs of meaningful interconnectedness exist. Once you understands the macro- and micro-dynamics of an influence network, you can utilize KOL influence strategically, on national, regional, and local levels, at scientific and dinner meetings, for a range of research initiatives and publishing plans. 

            To gather the most relevant and appropriate intelligence for your particular product and needs, ROI²’s specialists take you through carefully delineated steps. This kind of planning is critical in obtaining successful and usable results. First, we meet with all stake-holders involved with the particular product. Our goal: to determine the objectives, along with the intelligence and insights you (i.e., all members of the brand team) need, to accomplish your goals. Second, we distribute a target list of physicians across your company’s sales organization to ensure that it includes physicians in every region, district, Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA), and territory, so that every unit of the organization will be able to identify specific KOLs who can provide a range of services for their needs. Third, we develop a survey based on your objectives, mail it to our target physicians, and analyze and integrate our findings into a customizable database.

            In conjunction with standard business intelligence analytics, our peer-nomination-based surveys yield information that allows analysts to construct models of influence networks that map the complex interrelationships within a large network of opinion leaders. These networks are multidimensional, not only reflecting influence within a specific therapeutic area, but more strategically, homing in on specific issues within that therapeutic area and identifying KOLs based on their influence within a very discrete category. This process of drilling down to access granular details is extended to institutions, professional associations, and association guidelines.

           Once we have completed our intelligence gathering, we then gather all data, incorporate them into our database, create maps and other analytic tools and upload the information to our website for client use. This information can be easily accessed via the Web in a wide variety of customized formats and updated in real time through streaming competitive intelligence programs that include authorships, clinical trials, profiling and the like.

            ROI²’s Medical Intelligence Portal is one of our key advantages. Built on a .Net platform, it allows clients to easily import and export key information—including IMS Rx data —to and from other data sites within the company. Such data allows ROI² to go far beyond the traditional analysis and determine not just the selection ranking or leaders but also the market value of the leaders.

            This portal gives clients the ability to access new data, integrate it into an existing database or SFA application, access the combined data and generate customized reports at will. User-friendly and interactive, the ROI² Web platform can push information out to client data centers and integrate information from the clients’ staff and sales force, keeping all data up to the minute and providing more detailed views of influence relationships.

            What’s more, with all data in one place, people at every level of your organization—from product marketing to research, sales to management—

can access data that’s customized for their individual use. This allows them to “dice and slice” the data in a multitude of ways for a variety of purposes, then download and print it out with charts and graphs. Each person can log in and get what he or she needs with a password and the click of a mouse.

 As the process of business intelligence and influence mapping has become more sophisticated and refined, the potential for using influence data to increase brand awareness and uptake has increased. Companies can use the data to develop programs that communicate its product’s position to opinion leaders; recruit opinion leaders as advocates for speaker programs; and use national opinion leaders within local influence groups. They can also identify KOLs as either national or local leaders, early adopters, rising stars, or referral leaders and recruit them based on those identities. They may be invited, for example, to participate in a variety of activities, including take part in clinical research studies, author articles in high-profile medical journals, join advisory boards and speak at a key medical meeting.

            Intelligence like this is a key part of every marketing and sales activity surrounding a product. These activities include: selecting speakers—down to the territory; targeting early adopter KOLs, identifying advocates at community hospitals for formulary acceptance, segmenting leaders by key issues, identifying high value sales targets, developing medical journal plans, medical association programs, dinner meetings, and more.

Possibilities become more exciting when data makes it possible to match KOLs very closely with target audiences. For example, if Dr. Jones, a renowned KOL specialist who performs CABG procedures, is also recognized as a leading expert in blood conservation, a company can organize a meeting featuring Dr. Jones as a speaker, inviting target physicians who are especially interested in blood conservation. This kind of scenario has been customized and used by our clients to focus in on the specific types of influence drive their business.

Beyond matching KOLs and specific target audiences, influence data is also useful for increasing sales force effectiveness, identifying potential advocates at hospitals for formulary efforts, and targeting research centers and cultivating relationships with researchers for continuing product development. By integrating such information into other marketing data, it can create a powerful marketing tool with remarkable breadth and depth, helping clients not only generate loyalty among key physicians but also maintain that loyalty, in spite of competitors’ communication efforts.

           The bottom line: Getting your marketing and brand strategy right starts with business intelligence that captures exactly what you need, when and how you need it. Teamed with the right partner, you can cut costs, impact thought leaders, shorten the time needed for product uptake, influence patient treatment and gain a vital advantage in the marketplace. That partner: ROI².

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