Navigating the Life Sciences Market

Professor Tim Calkins brings a dual perspective as professor and practitioner. He prioritises marketing strategies tailored to the unique regulatory and ethical considerations of the industry, exploring entry, growth, and defensive strategies across the product life cycle.

Professor Tim Calkins

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

So we're very much welcome to this uh podcast, Voices of a Business School here at AVT Business School. And we have a very special edition here uh today focusing on our upcoming executive diploma in life sciences, which is focused very much on marketing and strategy and innovation. And we're launching this new program here in the fall of 2024. So we made this extraordinary podcast with a focus on that program. And we had invited one of our key faculty members on the program to come and visit in and talk a little bit about what he's teaching uh on the module. But once again, for those of you who haven't followed it, we we have this um life science uh diploma we're launching. There's three modules. One is on strategy and marketing, that's what we're gonna talk to today. The second module is on innovation and risk. It comes a little later. We're making a podcast based on that. And then we have the final module on financing and partnering. But with us here today, uh we have a distinguished faculty member I had the pleasure of working with previously in my career. It is Tim Colkins of uh Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, where he's been a professor for many years. He's also the associated chair of the marketing department at Kellogg. And and Tim, he is really an icon of mine here, uh not least with regard to marketing and life sciences. He's written five books in the field of marketing, but he's also written numerous cases on the life uh sciences, uh, with the life sciences focus uh used for for management and executive uh education. He's been working with many big pharmaceuticals and life science companies, including Roche, Medronic, Eli Lili, No Nordisk, and many and many more. But maybe, Tim, to to give the floor to you, maybe you want to fill in, maybe, and maybe something I missed out, or maybe your background as a practitioner, if you want to add to this brief introduction.

SPEAKER_01 2:06

Of course. Well, Casper, thank you. And great to be part of the podcast and part of the program. Uh in terms of my background, uh, you know, I come out of uh industry. So I began my career actually in marketing as a practitioner, and uh I worked in marketing for many years in the uh FMCG space. And eventually I shifted over to the academic world. I love teaching and I love interacting with students. And then gradually I got more and more involved in the world of life sciences and the world of healthcare. So I now teach uh two courses. I teach marketing strategy for growth and defense here at Kellogg. That's one course, but I also teach biomedical marketing. And that's a course I've now taught for more than a decade, but is really a deep dive into the complexities and the opportunities in the world of healthcare. So I love that field. It is really complicated, it's really fun to teach. And that's been a bigger and bigger part of my activities over the past decade.

SPEAKER_00 3:08

Great, great. Thanks for that, giving us uh a bit more on your background, much appreciated. So maybe go straight at it, you know. So we've been working together and talked a little bit about some of the key elements. So, so so what are we gonna gonna be be taught or looking into at the model that you're teaching here, here with us?

SPEAKER_01 3:30

So uh in the module, what I always try to do is I try to get people to uh really understand the opportunities and the challenges in the world of healthcare marketing. In a way, I'm trying to get people to think a little bit like a marketer and to bring that lens to healthcare, which is often so scientific and so grounded in clinical trials and and all of that. But of course, at the heart of healthcare are people and people behave in certain ways. And uh people sometimes don't think, you know, or people sometimes don't do what we think they should do, and sometimes they do what we think they shouldn't do. And a really important part of being successful in the healthcare space is to try to really think about that and understand it. So, in the course, what we cover is a lot of the core marketing frameworks and concepts and techniques. And then we look at how do those concepts and techniques play out in this strange world of healthcare? You know, one of the things we spend a lot of time on, for example, is trying to understand the decision-making process. Who's involved, what's motivating them, what is influencing their behavior. And when you really dig into a lot of the different products and drugs that come to market in healthcare, it's really complicated because there's so many people involved in any particular treatment decision. So in the course, we spend a lot of time thinking about the key players. We spend a lot of time thinking about how do we motivate them and how do we reach them and how do we effectively do that. You know, by the end of the program, my hope is that everybody will walk away understanding why marketing is so important in the world of healthcare, and then some frameworks and tools and techniques that can help them be more effective at using uh marketing to build product use and ultimately to help patients.

SPEAKER_00 5:28

Great. Thank thanks for that overview. So so the participants uh on this program, they're gonna work with with real uh uh product go-to-market plans, being being in a drug or or medical, medical um uh device. So, what are some of the key considerations maybe if you look at they they have to take uh take into account when they when they bring a product to market, maybe in terms of looking at the various types of customers or or the competitive landscape, but what what's what's especially important to uh to pay attention to when developing such a product marketing plan?

SPEAKER_01 6:06

Well, in healthcare, uh one of the things that is so important is that you need someone to really want a particular uh product or a particular drug. If you don't have somebody really fighting for a particular product or service or pharmaceutical, it's not likely to get adopted. You know, healthcare systems all around the world are incredibly effective at slowing down innovation, and they tend to be super resistant to change. And so one of the things we really see is that to be successful with a product, you need a super motivated customer, somebody who's willing to battle the bureaucracy, battle all the hurdles that healthcare systems around the world put up to sometimes slow down product adoption. And you need to find out, you know, where is that motivated person going to be? But what's interesting is that depending on the device or the pharmaceutical or the service you're bringing to market, that motivated person might reside in different places. Sometimes it might be the patient, sometimes it could be the physician, sometimes maybe the healthcare system, sometimes maybe the government. There's lots of different potential places you can go. So one of the things that we spend time on that I think is really important to think about is you know, who in the whole system is my ideal target? Who is that person that is most likely to really value this and most likely to really fight for it? Then the question is, well, what's important to them and how do we reach them and how do we communicate with them so that we can activate them and get uh product use? When you do it well, it's amazing how fast healthcare can pivot and how fast uh things can change. But you really need to have that motivated player involved, otherwise, it's not gonna happen.

SPEAKER_00 8:03

Right. So I I I think that that's really helpful to our to our audience to to understand what it is we're focusing on when bringing products to market and maximizing value in that regard. Can we also use marketing inside to understand a systematic analysis of of um of a given space to kind of steer product development or maybe making participation in a portfolio?

SPEAKER_01 8:28

Well, for sure. I think there's no question that bringing a marketing lens to a particular disease state or particular market is so important because it helps you understand what is happening at the moment and what could be possible in the future. And this is really important stuff in two ways. Number one, if you have a product in the market or close to coming to the market, well, it's incredibly important to understand the players, the motivation, what's happening there. But I think the value of a marketing lens is maybe greatest when you think upstream and you think early in the clinical development process. You know, so often in healthcare, what happens is companies develop products, molecules, and then they bring them to market and the darn thing doesn't really take off. But then you realize that what happened there was that a lot of the decisions that had been made early on in the development process just didn't set that product up for success. To be effective as an organization in this space, you really want to think very early on about a market, about the opportunities, about the motivations, so that you can do the most effective innovation work possible. You want to spend your RD, your development time and efforts in areas and on innovations that are likely to be successful commercially eventually in the market. But to do that, you got to ask some deep questions right at the beginning about motivations, about benefits, about uh, you know, how concrete the economics are behind some of these things. Those are questions that are much better off asked early rather than late. You know, the healthcare development cycle can be so long, especially for pharmaceuticals, that if you don't ask the right questions at the beginning, you can spend a lot of time bringing a product to market that just is never going to do what you want it to do. So you want to incorporate marketing and a marketing perspective, you know, late in the process, once you got a product on market, even late in product lifecycle, but also really early on too, to make sure you're doing all your development work in the right way.

SPEAKER_00 10:37

Great. Thanks for that elaborate insight on the markets and input to prioritization early on. Um, I know we've been working together previously, so I'm always very um I'm always very fascinated by this that you sometimes have a distinction or or you have a different toolbox or methodology in talking about entry strategies for new product or growth strategy or even defensive strategies. Are there some highlights from from that space or those distinctions that that you can enlighten us about a little bit or some of the key differences in thinking about what kind of position you have in the market or where you're taking it from?

SPEAKER_01 11:14

The interesting thing about strategy is that it really varies based on where you are. And the type of strategies you employ will be different depending on the situation you are facing at the moment. You know, I do bucket things into those three big areas. Number one, growth. How do you grow an existing product or how do you grow in a market that you are already in? And yeah, that's a big challenge. It is a super important challenge. There, you're looking at opportunities to improve buying rate, for example. So, how do we make sure customers are buying as much as possible? How do we optimize that? Or penetration, you know, how do we bring in new people to a product that's already there, already in the market? How do we think about that? Or even new products within a market where we already are, brings up questions about cannibalization, for example, and brand portfolio strategy. But growing the existing business is one bucket of challenges. And so I spend time looking at both those challenges. Uh, how do you think about it financially? How do we get financial growth? And then what are the levers we can pull? New products, though, are quite different. If you're trying to break into an existing market, you've got a totally different set of challenges in front of you because you have to figure out how are you going to get in there and how are you going to be successful. So either you've got to take market share from the people who are already there, or you've got to bring in new customers who aren't currently being part of that market. Either way, that's a pretty distinct set of challenges. So we spend time there thinking about okay, if you're going to go in, how is that going to happen? And then defense. Uh, I love defensive strategy. It is a topic that doesn't get a lot of attention. People don't talk about it very much, but it is so important. You know, the question is, how do you respond when a competitor shows up in your space? And what do you do? How do you think about that? How do you react to it? And what are the some of the steps that you can uh take? Uh, you know, it is, I think defense is actually the most important thing of all. Because if you have a new product and if the new product doesn't go well, well, the new product failed, okay, let's try something else. Or if you're on an your growth strategy doesn't work, what happens? Well, we didn't grow, and that was a bummer, but okay. But defensive strategy, if you can't stop a competitor from coming in and coming after your market share, if you fail at that, then you're done. You you've lost it, and it's very hard to recover from that. And defensive strategy requires a whole different mindset shift, and it is really fun to talk about that. And I think anybody who's going to be successful in the world of business needs to think about those three scenarios. And then, of course, how do you pull it all together into the portfolio and how do you integrate those different pieces? So when you think about marketing strategy, you know, that is the sort of the lens that I take to try to split up the strategic discussions into the scenarios where people are likely to be working most frequently.

SPEAKER_00 14:14

Great. Thanks a lot for giving us a little bit of insight into that. That very exciting uh topic I've I've seen also you engage in in the classroom with executives. Maybe a final question here. You are at KillOck, you know, maybe the episode at least seems from the outside of marketing research, also internationally. Are there anything you're working on and you and your colleagues are working on? What's what's taking up um your mind in the research field at Killlock here as the final question uh to you, maybe in your space or some of your colleagues?

SPEAKER_01 14:46

Well, there are a lot of interesting issues being studied here, cataloged by my colleagues, and the whole world of analytics is fascinating, and certainly AI is a fascinating thing. Um, I am personally really intrigued with uh two big areas. Number one, I'm intrigued with what's happening to the world of communication, and especially when you look at TikTok. And I think TikTok is an incredible platform for healthcare companies. It is a really complicated platform. But what is amazing is that people are on TikTok, especially younger people, and they are getting health information there. They're learning about new treatments, new therapies. Companies are more and more starting to use this platform. But it's really interesting to think about what works in that world, what is appropriate in that world, how do we use that most effectively as a healthcare organization, even to reach physicians or to reach disease state work? And so that's one uh thing that I'm intrigued about. The other piece that I'm really intrigued about, though, is uh how should companies these days uh interact in the public space? And branding is a topic I talk about a lot. And it's getting to be really complicated now for companies and organizations. You know, the question is when do you jump into an issue? When do you comment? When do you uh send your organization into a certain space? And that is uh it's really challenging for companies uh right now. There are so many controversial issues in the world. And the question is, when do you make a comment? When do you not make a comment? How is that going to reflect on your organization? How does that impact your employees? What's the right thing to say? Um, you know, these days, what you'll see you're seeing is that companies are really struggling with that. They put out a statement on a certain topic, and then a couple of days later, they put out another statement. They're like, shoot, that wasn't the right thing to say, so let's try again. And then a couple of days later, they put out another statement. And they're like, we still haven't gotten this right. And it's one of the things that as business leaders, it is top of mind. And I think that is particularly true when you get to the world of healthcare, because healthcare and life sciences, I think the expectation for firms is maybe higher. It's one thing if you're making potato chips or uh, you know, tires or something. It's another thing in the life sciences when you're dealing with people and lives and individuals, and that makes it doubly complicated to figure out how in a polarized world do you successfully navigate things as an organization. And uh there's not a simple answer to that, but there's a lot of important things to think about. And that's an area that I'm spending a lot of time thinking about, looking at, researching, and trying to more fully understand. So always things to talk about and uh study in the world of marketing. It's always changing. That's what makes it fun and interesting to talk about.

SPEAKER_00 17:42

Thank you so much for your time this morning, uh, your time this late afternoon here in Copenhagen. It was already getting dark here uh in the middle of November. But thanks a lot for your time, Tim, this morning, and and thanks to your the listeners for for listening into this. Tim, he will be here uh in Copenhagen in September of 24, where you can meet him uh face to face if you're interested in in our executive uh diploma program on life sciences. But thanks to you um with tuning out here and uh thanks for listening in. Cheers.