Competitive Intelligence: A Substantial Advantage for the Pharmaceutical Sector

“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting” – Sun Zhu, Competitive Intelligence benefits your organization gather and analyzing information related to your competitor’s business models. This deep analysis helps your organization reduce the strategic risks and increase revenue opportunities by attaining deep insights into how the market has changed and what trends can be expected in the upcoming time. It also empowers the decision-makers of the organization to improve decision-making and execution by comparing competitors’ strengths and weaknesses to owns. Competitive Intelligence includes information about:

Customers’ Needs
Competitors Plans
Technologies Trends
Suppliers
Products and Services in demand

The need for competitive intelligence has gained more importance than ever since the healthcare sector has restructured its priorities in response to COVID-19. To prevent your company from being blindsided, you must keep a close eye on how the competitor is positioning itself. Strong competitive intelligence is a critical component of success whether you are into business expansion, product development, or selling products or therapies.

Benefits of Competitive Intelligence

Improved due Diligence in Licensing and Mergers and Acquisitions (M&As): Due diligence before any licensing or M&As is always important but in the case of pharmaceutical companies it plays an extremely important role. Using different CI tools can benefit in getting valuable insights in the determination of R&D synergies between two companies or understanding combined operational risks or metrics involved with any agreement.
Better brand marketing and commercialization: Besides assisting the pharma companies in making decisions related to drug marketing, competitive intelligence also provides solutions for better marketing position of their assets. For developing a superior brand strategy, the product management and sales team need to be informed regarding key target audience, marketing activities, competitor brand messaging, geographical coverage, and sales team structure. CI provides these updates beforehand and this helps the companies to prepare an effective brand strategy for quick market uptake.
Tools for penetration into new markets: Entering the new market, specifically the emerging ones, presents many challenges for pharma companies. In such scenarios, CI helps in the quick assessment of the new market environment and provides roadmaps for dealing with the challenges.
Enhanced Research and Development: “Fail Early, Fail Fast” is the principle followed by pharma companies to cut losses and move on. By adopting Competitive Intelligence, companies can save their precious resources by keeping the track of their competitors’ failures, eventually avoiding making the same mistakes. Pharma Competitive Intelligence also helps the companies be updated about the latest breakthrough trials and therapies and provides them time to re-establish and scale up their drug development plans.
Influential Portfolio Management: An effective portfolio management or drug development program is important for pharmaceutical companies to have maximum output on the basis of selected commercial, regulatory and clinical criteria. Among them, the key areas are managing various pipeline assets, prioritizing research and development, and assurance of optimal resource utilization. A drug developer should constantly keep an eye on the latest trends in the markets to ace portfolio management, especially with regard to the competition. Eventually, effective portfolio management through pharmaceutical market intelligence ensures a promising and steady pipeline, tailored to the current and future market scenarios.

CONCLUSION

Insights are essential if a business is looking forward to being successful. Rather than waiting for your competitors to hit your bottom line, one should consider adopting for a Competitive Intelligence Strategy as soon as possible. It makes no difference if you are just getting started. or you have been doing it for a long time, competitive intelligence is a tried-and-true strategy for expanding and succeeding.

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