“ Fall-Back Options ”
Barriers To Make a Big Behavioral Change in Your Market
Of course there will always be forces working against you, limiting or preventing your customers from adopting your new desired behavior.
A very common barrier nowadays is there are solid fall back options nearly in all therapeutic class, what I mean by fall back option is a trusted products that physicians use for a long time and they are highly satisfied with them.
Across many therapy classes that I worked in, each time I did market research on the treatment success criteria and the level of physicians satisfaction with the current treatment options the satisfaction rating was between 7-9 on a scale of 10. It’s scary to launch a new treatment where the satisfaction of the current treatment option is very high, it used to scare me, but I learnt that this is normal as with all the development in the pharma industry during the last decades the scientists managed to develop highly effective and tolerable medication that treat diseases in a significantly better way than the old generations of medicine.
Over the last several decades, scientists have developed highly effective medications that treat diseases more significantly, and in a more patient-friendly manner than the older generation of medications introduced in the second half of the 20th century.
The question arises about why the pharmaceutical industry continues to launch new and expensive treatments when the old ones are working so well. People outside the industry think the motivation might be greed, but this is not true. Actually, Big Pharma only launches new products that can benefit patients with added value, but the newly added value is not as giant an improvement when compared with the significant leaps the current treatments have made over the older generation of medications formulated in the second half of the 20th century. There is an improvement, but not as much especially on the classical disease symptoms.
This explains why the fall-back barrier is so common. Physicians are largely satisfied with what they’re currently using, and if you underestimate the power of the fall-back option, your strategy will suffer.
Even though newly launched products may have some competitive advantages, the value-added benefits may not be sufficient to induce physicians to change their behaviour. How, then, can a marketing strategist overcome this barrier?
The first way to overcome the fall-back barrier is not to compete head-to-head with this fallback option
But instead, design your commercial offer in such a way that it minimizes the fall-back barrier by smoothing the path for gaining the first prescription. Identify a specific patient profile that will benefit the most from your brand’s unique competitive advantage.
The second way is to change your view regarding the current high level of satisfaction with the current treamnt options
The high satisfaction level rating between 7 – 9 means also if you are able to increase the satisfaction by small fractional improvements that will generate a significant behaviour change toward the adoption of the new innovative product as the market is highly sensitive to value like never before. Remember that this satisfaction rating has been in place prior to the arrival of your new product and before the market has been exposed to any of your messaging.
The third way is to focus at launch on your brand’s imidiate gains not long term ones
Should physicians try your new product, they may grow impatient if an exciting new product doesn’t work immediately; rather than persevere, doctors will often fall-back to their tried-and-true proven solutions. When physicians have excellent medications that are already highly effective, there is little incentive to continue with the new medication if it doesn’t immediately perform better.
