Between the core steps of gathering insights, defining strategy, and executing strategy, lies a critical step in launch planning: mobilization. Think of it as stakeholdering, gaining buy-in, or herding cats – whatever metaphor is familiar: it’s the internal process of taking what we’ve learned about customers and turning it into what we will do to win.
This process often coincides with a time of high transformation within organizations, as the commercial team is built out, leaders join from a variety of backgrounds, deadlines are in flux, and the market landscape evolves. With every passing of the baton, every onboarding of new teams, every senior leader asking a pointed question about a particular topic, it becomes less and less likely that core customer insights remain in focus.
This is where we see launch planning lose sight of its north star. Anchoring to insights at every step of the launch planning process, especially when setting the brand strategy foundation and mobilization, is critical to avoid common pitfalls that occur when launch goals become distanced from the needs of the customer. By anchoring – and re-anchoring – to insights, teams gain the strategic focus they need to define and execute on winning strategies that meet and surpass launch goals.
In the words of one of our clients:
“As CCO, I’m always working towards helping the team focus on the right things as we prepare for launch, especially as we quickly scale the organization and onboard new team members. Developing strategic imperatives that are anchored in customer insights helps us prioritize our investments and focus on the ‘critical few’ high-impact deliverables. This is the key to a successful launch.”
Here’s how we helped this CCO accomplish this during accelerated launch preparations:
Case Study
Challenge: The CCO of a small biotech needed to develop and mobilize market development and brand strategy for their first product during a period of intense internal expansion and transformation to a commercialization organization. The product was launching in a rare disease with expected upcoming competition, and their FDA review date had been accelerated. Relative to the timeline, the CCO had joined the organization late. She had a very contracted period to identify the barriers to success and how to address them, secure the needed resources, and hire and activate marketers and agency to develop and launch fit-for-purpose market development campaigns.
Setting the Strategy Foundation
Approach: HawkPartners formed a core team with the CCO, Medical leader, and Operations leader and jumped into action. We collectively identified patient inertia and lack of engagement with healthcare system as a potential barriers to medium term growth, based on existing insights and our years of experience in similar launches.
To build out those barriers, we conducted efficient insights work to uncover the drivers of many patients’ journey into inertia and isolation, as well as HCPs’ feelings of frustration and apathy. We then connected the dots between HCP and patient insights to dimensionalize the experience, demonstrating how stakeholders’ barriers build upon each other to drive behavior in the space.
Following research, we framed the insights and facilitated alignment on hypotheses related to patient segments, brand distinction and barriers requiring pre-launch disease state education. In addition to maximizing the value of the insights work, this stakeholdering started the mobilization process early, ensuring key internal people were engaged from the beginning and including their valuable perspectives.
We then returned to insights, conducting additional work to evaluate these hypotheses and support final decision making on the brand strategy foundation. And when it was time to generate buy-in on next steps, we incorporated the voice of the customer into board presentations to deepen understanding challenged posed by the inertia barrier.
Outcome: The board agreed to the investment in strategic imperatives to overcome barriers. An AOR was selected using the insights-based agency brief we crafted, which supported rapid onboarding of marketers and agency, generation of the creative brief, and materials development for Disease State Education campaign.
Moving Ahead: Mobilization
With the strategy foundation set and the pre-launch DSE campaign in the works, the focus turned to building a mobilization blueprint for the defined Strategic Imperatives with the now greatly expanded cross-functional team by T-12 months. Based on the insights, the blueprint process detailed the current state of stakeholders by Imperative and built a shared understanding of the desired state so the whole team understood what success looked like. The exercise also illuminated just how many initiatives were being considered by each functional team, and helped the organization align behind the ones that would have the most impact on the strategic imperatives. This shared understanding of the elements of success, importance of focus, and interdependencies guided all the detailed executional planning, and will continue to guide the organization going forward.
When teams have the support and discipline to anchor their launch planning in customer insights from start to finish, they arrive at launch with a head start on success. This ensures that strategy aligns to target customers and market environment and establishes the internal best practice of re-grounding in insights during mobilization, setting the stage to focus upon executing a key set of integrated initiatives that drive value for the customers and a successful launch.