The Case for Evaluating Customer Habits as Part of a Successful Commercial Model

By Noah M. Pines and Audrey Wu, ThinkGen

Introduction: The Blind Spot in Brand Planning

Most pharma marketing teams have a blind spot. They significantly overestimate customers’ demand for new treatments, while overlooking or underestimating the behavioral inertia – customers’ ingrained behaviors or habits – that must be overcome for a new product to reach the hands of patients who need them most.

There is an answer. Marketing teams must incorporate a deep understanding of customer habits at the earliest stages of launch planning and demand forecasting. This type of research and analysis helps teams fully grasp the drivers and barriers of this behavioral inertia, and design and calibrate their launch priorities accordingly.

While technology, social media, and CPG companies thrive on the neuromarketing insights of habit understanding, few of today’s biopharma companies do this. 

Habits Form Very Quickly in the Pharmaceutical Practice Setting

A habit is a routine behavior that is regularly performed without conscious deliberation. Think for a moment about eating breakfast or driving to work. These are mundane behaviors we perform automatically. Habits enable survival and efficiency; they help humans get through the day.

Research has shown that people establish habits through repetition: we are conditioned to act when triggered (by a specific cue) that appears within a stable environment (or context), and we repeat this behavior reflexively as a function of reinforcement. In his studies of animal behavior, psychologist B.F. Skinner noted: “Hit the lever, get the pellet.”

It is a cycle. The more we do something and receive a reward, the more it becomes hard wired into the circuitry of our brain. Neurobiology research proves this.

While we think of healthcare providers (HCPs) as fundamentally rational decisionmakers who deliberate over the costs and benefits of each treatment decision, they, too, develop habits - and sometimes very strong habits. This is rooted in the context in which HCPs practice – a context characterized by limited time, situational variability, and often high risks. Anyone who has launched a pharmaceutical product, especially in crowded and/or genericized market spaces, knows that HCPs’ ingrained habits can counteract adoption.

In preparation for launch, marketers will have surveyed the patient journey, competitive landscape, and unmet needs, but they haven’t had a methodology to rigorously evaluate customer habits. Nor have they had a way to incorporate an understanding of habits as part of the brand planning process. Until now.