Brand plan
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 a realistic operational implementation of the brand strategy?
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 strategy that has an impact and is convincing?
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 brand 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 brand plan, in line with your internal recommendation