From launch challenges, to market access pressures, to policy changes that are shortening product lifecycles, brand managers now face a perfect storm that would have been unthinkable just a decade ago. This two-part series explores insights from Luke Greenwalt, who leads IQVIA’s U.S. Center for Thought Leadership and Innovation, and has experienced these challenges as both a brand manager and a strategic partner. In this first installment, Luke weighs in on why traditional brand management approaches are failing in the current environment. In the second post, he’ll discuss how data, AI, and strategic partnerships are creating new pathways to success in what he calls the industry’s Brave New World.

The lifecycle under pressure

IQVIA: From your perspective, what are the most urgent challenges brand leaders now face?

Luke: Brands are increasingly challenged throughout the entire product lifecycle—from launch to inline, where market access pressures are pushing net sales down, to end of lifecycle, where things like the Inflation Reduction Act are chopping years off the economic life of products. Brand managers now have to think years ahead, not just about the next quarter or two.

On data delays and misaligned metrics

IQVIA: We know that data and analytics are critical in this environment. What are some of the most common struggles in the quest to gather and use actionable insights?

Luke: From my own experience, one of the most significant is the lag in getting meaningful performance data. During my time as a brand manager, I managed campaigns as they were coming, trying to build demand over time. Inevitably it would be six or nine months after the fact before I would even be able to diagnose what happened in the market. Three months beyond that, I could strategize what to do with it. And another six months beyond that, I could actually put a campaign into the market to address it. So not having timely insights can put a brand manager 18 months to two years behind being able to address those challenges.

These days, brand teams are sitting on more information and more data than ever before. So, why are we still measuring the same way we have for the last 20 years? Knowing that a physician writes brand A versus brand B at launch tells you about a decision, but it doesn’t tell you about the behavior of that physician.

Understanding the behavior that drove that decision is equally important. It’s now possible to study every decision on every brand within a physician’s practice—brands A through Z—to understand time to first prescription from launch. That tells us about physician behavior, not just a decision.

The demand efficiency question

IQVIA: Can you give us a specific example of how brand leaders may be measuring the wrong outcomes?

Luke: One of the best examples is what we call demand efficiency. If you’re a brand team and you generate patients to come in and get on to a product, what’s the actual rate of those patients successfully navigating access or affordability challenges to get on treatment? For example, we looked at a brand that launched in 2022 that lost 96% of the demand they generated. They only captured 4%. Think about that. That brand didn’t necessarily have that type of insight because they were measuring the wrong thing. They weren’t looking at the patient journey holistically, linking different analytics to create an understanding of how patients navigate that care pathway to get on and stay on a prescription.

The jockey or the horse?

IQVIA: How should brand leaders think about measuring success differently?

Luke: Unless you’re a die-hard horseracing fan, you probably have never heard of Russell Baze. He’s the losingest jockey in all of horse racing history. He has lost over 39,000 races. The question is, would you want to have that person on your horse riding it in a race? Well, if you only looked at those 39,000 losses, you’re probably going to say “no.” But what if I told you he’s also the winningest jockey of all time and has won over 13,000 races? This question of what you measure is vitally important. Brand managers should ask: Are we looking solely at how we’re measuring success? Or, are we also trying to understand the bigger scope of what’s happening in the landscape?

You’ve probably heard of major brands like Humira or Wegovy, but do you know who those brand managers were? No. So this raises a pivotal question: Is it the jockey or the horse? There are many more brands that need a successful jockey than there are guaranteed winning horses.

A tale of two launches

IQVIA: Can you share a personal example of how that principle plays out in practice?

Luke: When I was a brand manager, I launched multiple brands. One was very successful. We planned with a high degree of specificity and had very strong analytics that gave us scenarios for when the market was going to reach certain points where we would activate our strategy and release funding. That brand came out very successfully.

Conversely, I had another one that was not so great. I was brought on late and was asked to take over brand leadership about a month before the product was coming to market. There were multiple assumptions that had been made about the product that turned out to not be true post-launch—things like market sizing, the investment hypothesis, the willingness to put in promotional spend, and the targeting segmentation. In the real world, all of that looked very different from the plan I was handed. As that brand came into the market, it struggled. We missed forecasts for the first few years. In fact, it got so bad that the brand was deprioritized in the portfolio. But even though it was difficult, I learned more from that adversity than I did from the successes.

IQVIA: When you think about the kinds of decisions that brand leaders struggle with the most, how does IQVIA help bring clarity to those moments?

Luke: Given the volume of launches and challenges in today’s environment, it’s important to have a partner along the way that has industry-wide experience. That partner needs to see more than just a brand or a manufacturer, or even a therapeutic area. They need the collective experience to work broadly across the industry. It’s a differentiator for IQVIA that we work with literally every manufacturer that has a product in the U.S. market and many globally.

Beyond that, we help brand leaders with data-driven decision-making. It’s no longer enough to go with your gut or to say, “This is what I think is going to happen” and not back it up with the information that can support that decision. Instead, brand leaders need to ask questions: Are you measuring the right things to understand whether your campaign or strategy is being successful? Or are you relegating yourself to only measuring successful patients? If it’s the latter, what about all that other activity you might be generating?

I’ll offer baseball as an analogy. The average Major League Baseball game has nine hits, so if you only watch the hits, you could watch every baseball game in about a minute. If you’re not a fan but you like watching highlights, just turn on ESPN SportsCenter and you can quickly catch up with everything that happened in the league.

But do highlights show everything that happened in any game? Of course not. There was a world of activity that happened that led to those hits or led to that score. If you want to influence scores over time, it’s important to study the bigger picture. Brand managers can’t just tune into the metrics equivalent of SportsCenter. Today, you must think beyond what “success” looks like and start tuning into all the factors that increase or decrease the likelihood of your target outcomes.

Partnership misconceptions

IQVIA: As brand managers work to improve what and how they measure, they can turn to external partners for support. What’s one misconception brand leaders often have about working with a partner like IQVIA?

Luke: There’s a common misconception that everything is available off the shelf. IQVIA is a big place with lots of solutions, and sometimes that can be confusing. But often brand managers have questions that require very nuanced answers and a more custom solution. That said, the earlier we are engaged, the more of a partner we can become. If a brand leader interacts with us in a transactional way, they’re underutilizing what our organization can do.

The path forward

The challenges facing brand managers are real and accelerating. Traditional approaches that worked even five years ago are proving insufficient in an environment where product lifecycles are compressed, competition is intensifying, and patient journeys are becoming even more complex. The brands that will succeed are those that recognize the need for new measurement approaches, deeper behavioral insights, and truly strategic partnerships.

In his next post, Luke will explore how leading brand managers are using AI, predictive analytics, and strategic partnerships to not just survive but thrive in what he calls the industry’s Brave New World.