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Brand plan

Brand plan Agency Consulting firm Experts Specialists Consultancy

Build and implement your brand’s marketing strategy

For more than 30 years, our specialized team has been supporting companies in building, writing, and implementing their brand plans or marketing plans in order to guide sales and marketing teams and ensure the success of their brand.

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    Key success factors for a brand plan

    Drawing up a Brand Plan is a key but complex exercise, based on strategic and tactical thinking and requiring the involvement and collaboration of many players (from the business lines, Global and Subsidiaries). Building one or more Brand Plans, particularly in the pharmaceutical industry, requires several key success factors to be considered, including the challenges below.

    Although the Brand Plan is an exercise often carried out by the marketing or sales teams, it must nevertheless be based on a co-construction process involving all the business lines (medical, market access, public affairs, regulatory, etc.). In fact, the Brand Plan must enable us to align the challenges of all our internal stakeholders.

    The internal process for defining the Brand Plan must therefore be designed to create conditions that are conducive to this co-construction, by allowing the key business units to contribute and integrate their issues, and by providing opportunities or forums for discussion to generate alignment.

    What internal process should be put in place to ensure the involvement and alignment of all the business lines? How can we encourage all the business units to support the exercise and the actions to be carried out as defined in the Brand plan?

    To carry out the Brand Plan’s central strategic reflection process, it is key to rely on external insights. These insights are essential for understanding changes in the market, the competitive environment and the needs and practices of customers, and for challenging and possibly redefining customer segmentation and brand positioning.

    Upstream, this involves:

    • Taking stock of the insights available
    • Identifying insight gaps
    • Anticipating how to generate and collect these missing insights, particularly by investigating external stakeholders (healthcare professionals, patients, payers, etc.).

    What external insights are available? What insights are missing from our strategic thinking? How can they be gathered?

    A common pitfall in drawing up Brand Plans is that they become a theoretical strategic exercise, which does not sufficiently ensure their operational implementation.

    It is therefore key not to limit the discussion to strategy (vision, strategic imperatives) and tactical orientations, but also to allow time to reflect on the implementation and execution of the tactics and actions envisaged (e.g. governance, tools and indicators for initiating and steering an activity).

    How can we integrate thinking about execution into the Brand Plan development process? How can we ensure realistic operational implementation of the Brand Plan?

    The Brand Plan needs to be structured and formalized in a clear and impactful way, so that it becomes a convincing tool:

    • From Global to Subsidiaries, to mobilize and engage countries
    • From the Subsidiaries to the Global level, to obtain the means and resources needed to implement the Brand Plan.

    How to involve subsidiaries in a Brand Plan process initiated globally?

    How can we build a Brand Plan that has an impact and is convincing?

    How we support you in the challenges related to marketing plan and brand plan

    Our support enables our clients to accelerate the construction of their brand plans, to facilitate the internal work process with all the business lines (marketing, market access, medical affairs, sales,…) and to bring an external viewpoint to challenge their vision. We offer different types of support with various scopes, from the leanest (structuring and formalization of the plan) to the most elaborate (exploration of key issues, co-construction process of strategic imperatives and tactics, …), up to the operational implementation of the tactics defined together.

    We can support you:

    • In performing the analysis of the current environment or “situation analysis” based on your internal data and/or by challenging your vision with an external investigation
    • In the definition of your strategic imperatives, their tactical declinations, and associated indicators by moderating workshops and writing sessions, with the multidisciplinary stakeholders involved, and therefore allowing the generation of ideas and reaching consensus
    • In the development of operational roadmaps and their sequencing over time
    • In structuring, formalizing, and writing the plan, in line with your internal recommendation

    Examples of recent brand plans carried out for our clients

    • Brand plan for the launch of a cell therapy in France

      We supported the French subsidiary of a leading healthcare company in the launch of a cell therapy. Our role was to accelerate the development of their marketing plan, from the definition of the business ambition to the operational roadmap.

      Conducted in an agile manner to meet a tight timing challenge, the project involved a series of workshops with phases of analysis (SWOT, gap analysis, analysis of the French context, …), segmentation and prioritization of targets while integrating the strategic and tactical imperatives defined by global teams in order to create consensus within the multidisciplinary teams in the subsidiary (medical, marketing, market access, …).

      We then helped our client to formalize a summary document to present a clear and argued vision of the plan to the global team.

    • Brand plan to launch a treatment targeting a rare disease

      We assisted a pharmaceutical company in the development of its brand plan for the launch of a new treatment indicated for a rare disease.

      After having collected all the internal information (practices, needs and expectations of prescribers, patient pathways, commercial perspectives, competition, market situation, budgets, etc.), we structured them to allow the co-construction of a complementary action plan aiming at reinforcing the tactical declinations already identified beforehand, in line with the strategic imperatives.

      Through working sessions and iterations with our clients, we formalized a tailor-made document synthesizing the content of the plan from the vision to the operational aspects of the activities (roadmap, tactics, indicators, etc.), serving as a presentation document for the management committee.

    • Global brand plans for a portfolio of 7 products

      Our team supported a world leader in the pharmaceutical industry in the formalization and structuring of the brand plans for its portfolio of 7 products.

      Our role was to provide project management support for this annual exercise, based on a work already initiated by our client, to bring an external perspective and structure to the project, while ensuring the overall coherence across the portfolio of products.

      The project was structured around several alignment sessions with the global teams and a personalized support for each brand lead, leading to the validation of each of the different product portfolio plans.

    • Medical strategy of a pharmaceutical company to feed and finalize its brand plans

      We supported the medical affairs department of a pharmaceutical company in defining its strategy and its operational implementation from a medical point of view for its product portfolio.

      The objective of our project was to help our client to enrich and finalize the brand plans of its product portfolio by ensuring that its medical strategy was put forward. In order to do so, our team has first of all drawn up a state of the art of the in-scope pathology, then evaluated the therapeutic strategy of the latter, and investigated the competitive situation from a medical point of view.

      Following our external analysis, we conducted several working sessions with our client’s medical/marketing/sales teams in order to define the subsidiary’s strategic imperatives based on the global ambitions, their tactical declinations and the associated implementation timelines.

      Our team supported our client until the structuring and the written formalization of the final versions of its brand plans, allowing the consolidation of all the elements before presenting them to the global teams.

    • Restructuration of the Brand Plan process between Global and Subsidiaries for a pharmaceutical manufacturer

      We worked with the global teams of a pharmaceutical manufacturer to overhaul its Brand Plan preparation and updating process, in order to make it more accessible and implementable by the Subsidiaries and operational teams.

      To do this, we identified the areas for improvement in the current process, as well as the teams’ best practices, and then built and formalised the new process. We relied on in-house interviews and the organisation of work sessions involving the various professions concerned at Global and Subsidiary level.

      The project resulted in a more agile Brand Plan process between Global and Subsidiaries, with a clarification and simplification of the governance and updating schedule, as well as a review of the expected content.

    • Understanding of market needs and perceptions to inform the Global Brand Plan strategy of a leading pharmaceutical company

      We worked with the global teams of a pharmaceutical company to analyse how healthcare professionals perceive their products and brands and what their needs are in four key therapeutic areas in the main markets.

      We conducted around twenty interviews with healthcare professionals relevant to each of the four therapeutic areas. This enabled us to understand their expectations of a pharmaceutical player, their unmet needs and the perception of our client’s products in relation to competitors in a given therapeutic area.

      Our project enabled our client to adjust the positioning of their products according to better-defined customer segments, and to identify strategic imperatives for their Global Brand Plans.

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      Tell us about your uncharted territory

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      To go further...

      Founded in 1993, Alcimed is an innovation and new business consulting firm, specializing in innovation driven sectors: life sciences (healthcare, biotech, agrifood), energy, environment, mobility, chemicals, materials, cosmetics, aeronautics, space and defence.

      Our purpose? Helping both private and public decision-makers explore and develop their uncharted territories: new technologies, new offers, new geographies, possible futures, and new ways to innovate.

      Located across eight offices around the world (France, Europe, Singapore and the United States), our team is made up of 220 highly-qualified, multicultural and passionate explorers, with a blended science/technology and business culture.

      Our dream? To build a team of 1,000 explorers, to design tomorrow’s world hand in hand with our clients.

      A brand plan, often also referred to as a “marketing plan”, is an essential document detailing a company’s marketing strategy and actions to ensure the success of its brand in its target markets. It is a strategic tool that evolves over time, serving as a guide for sales and marketing teams over a period often ranging from 1 to 5 years.

      A Brand Plan for a pharmaceutical company, drawn up for a brand, a product, a therapeutic area or a business unit, mainly contains :

      • An analysis of the internal situation (launch or development plan for a treatment, sales and forecasts, etc.) and external situation (therapeutic strategy and care pathways, needs of doctors and patients, competition, etc.).
      • A definition of strategic imperatives, broken down into tactical guidelines
      • An operational roadmap, with the actions required to achieve the objectives and the operational implications (timetable, deliverables, governance, budget, KPIs, etc.).