By Edouard Demeire, expert-trainer of The Pharma Brand Planning Course.
Even the most well-intentioned brand plans can fall short if built on outdated habits or assumptions within a company where brand plans are perceived as an annual ritual rather than a core process. Effective pharma brand planning demands more than just a polished slide deck. It requires strategic clarity, cross-functional alignment, and a deep understanding of customer needs.
From his vast experience in guiding and training brand plan teams, Edouard Demeire has distilled 12 common pitfalls that can undermine brand planning efforts, along with the good practices that help teams avoid them and drive meaningful impact.
1. Strategy Development & Adaptation
Focus: How plans are initiated, updated, and aligned with reality.
✅ Are developed and/or updated when an event or learning renders the current version obsolete
🚫 Are rewritten annually, whether there are new learnings or market changes, or not
✅ Developed with the intent of gaining new insights from stakeholders and identifying tactics driving success
🚫 Written to justify to the company that already existing strategy & tactics are the right ones
✅ Reviewed at least quarterly for strategic fit and integrate impact on customer experience
🚫 Developed in Q2 and then shelved during implementation from Q1 to Q4 of the following year
2. Cross-Functional Collaboration & Planning Process
Focus: Team dynamics, integration, and input.
✅ Developed in cross-functional team meetings with the objective of aligning insights, communicating clear strategic choices and the customer purpose of the resulting tactics
🚫 Seen by the organisation as a pre-formatted document to be completed and sent to finance
✅ An integrated sales, medical, access plan with both conventional and innovative (digital) solutions
🚫 Separate commercial, medical and access plans - each with one 'digital' slide
✅ Developed bottom-up, then budgets drive tactics top-down
🚫 Teams empowered to act, with line management providing input on quality
3. Content Clarity & Communication
Focus: Structure, format, and logical consistency of the plan.
✅ Simplifying the situation so as to create clarity by focusing on key insights, strategies and tactics in a logically consistent flow
🚫 Complex detail, in hundreds of slides with Key Drivers, Strategic Imperatives and Critical Success Factors that don't match
4. Customer & Market Relevance
Focus: Relevance of plans to actual customer insights and market needs.
✅ Results in addressing customer perceptions, pain-points and achieving behavioural change
🚫 Describe features of the product to be communicated regardless of current customer beliefs, behaviours and experiences
✅ A mix of creating competitive foresight and identification of demand-driven competitive insights
🚫 A list of competitor features and historical actions
✅ Global plans provide inputs to for example Life Cycle Management, but plans fully reflect local situations
🚫 Global plans are copy/pasted with tactics localised based on unwritten assumptions of local customer situations
5. Ensuring Quality
Focus: How brand plans are developed, assessed and validated.
✅ Evaluated based on mutually agreed quality assurance questionnaire
🚫 Evaluated by leaders based on their own preference
✅ Brand Teams are fully enabled to conduct the brand planning process with a full understanding of the rationale, how to conduct and present each step with high quality
🚫 Brand teams receive a template or toolkit with limited explanations on rationale and expectations for each ‘slide’
🎓 If you want to learn about:
- Analytical tools to discover and leverage patient-centric and stakeholder insights.
- How to determine the brand's Critical Success Factors that will ensure the brand planning process leads to customer-centric tactics.
- Processes and best practices for the two critical strategic decisions: “Where to play?” and “How to win?” (Segmentation & targeting – Positioning).
- How to design the tactical mix for highly competitive “Red Ocean” markets.
- How to make competition irrelevant by creating a highly innovative and new “Blue Ocean” market for your brand.
👉 Attend Edouard Demeire’s highly praised 2-day course:
The Pharma Brand Planning Course
With Edouard Demeire
