In the first installment of this series, IQVIA’s Luke Greenwalt detailed the mounting pressures facing pharmaceutical brand managers and why traditional strategies are falling short. In this post, Luke discusses how artificial intelligence, predictive analytics, and strategic partnerships are creating new pathways to success in what he describes as the industry’s Brave New World—a fundamental before-and-after moment that’s reshaping how successful brands operate.

The speed revolution

IQVIA: How are AI and advanced analytics changing the pace of decision-making?

Luke: Just a couple of years ago, doing a market access study, something simple like understanding who the payers are, what patients are being asked to pay, who’s on formulary, would take 8 to 12 weeks. At IQVIA, we’ve created tools that allow us to drop that to one to two weeks, and we’re on the precipice of taking that from one to two weeks to a day, or even minutes.

IQVIA: Why is speed so critical to revenue performance?

Luke: Let’s say you’re in a traditional model where it takes you a couple of months to identify a market trend—whether that’s slower-than-expected physician activation, an issue in a patient service program where patients are falling off, or a payer access issue. If you can’t diagnose those for several months, that puts the strategy to understand what to do about it even further behind.

Without real-time decision-making and measurement, it’s difficult to respond to a challenge quickly. Six months later, you could still be trying to address an issue when you have entirely different ones that have come up. That’s not a good look when reporting up to brand or commercial leadership.

From descriptive to predictive

IQVIA: How are the best brand leaders using predictive analytics?

Luke: If you’re only studying a decision, such as brand A versus brand B, is that enough to become predictive on what could happen in the future? No. As you think about moving from descriptive analytics to predictive, you must first exhaust the descriptive universe. You need to be able to explain a decision literally every single time it’s occurring in order to emerge with the patterns that say, “I can now make a prediction.”

That means we need to understand patterns across all therapeutic classes and all patients happening within a physician’s practice. That takes billions of prescription claims to see this and begin to describe it, and it’s only been recently that we gained the tools, resources, and technology to do this at scale and speed.

The market dynamic revolution

IQVIA: Can you give us a concrete example of insights that are only visible at that industry level?

Luke: Here’s a great example related to Medicare. In 2024, patient out-of-pocket expenses went down in Medicare Part D, with patients no longer paying 5% co-insurance when they’re in catastrophic coverage. It doesn’t sound like that big of a deal, right? A patient on a $10,000 product went from paying $500 in co-insurance to paying nothing.

Now, if you study that at an individual brand level, you might see a bump, but you’re not sure what it means. At IQVIA, we studied activity across all of Medicare Part D and what we saw was astounding. In oncology, across all brands being utilized under Medicare Part D in 2024, there was a 50% increase in utilization.

That happened because of that change in patient benefit design. So, if you’re measuring that at an individual brand level, you may not understand what the driver is. Play that forward a couple of years, and today’s tailwinds could become headwinds as insurers struggle with rising healthcare costs.

Rethinking investment strategy

IQVIA: Where are brand leaders making investment mistakes?

Luke: Let’s start with promotional spend. We’ve studied thousands of launches over the last few years and looked deeply at direct-to-consumer (DTC) investment. A decade ago, investment returned multiples on the amount being spent within the first couple of years. As we move forward over time, however, that return on investment has declined. Why? TV advertising has become more expensive and more prolific.

As brand manager today, you need to make sure you’re staging that investment appropriately. Instead of doing heavy DTC advertising very early, consider staging it so you’re hitting certain performance benchmarks before you unleash those big dollars. If done wrong, these investments can be career killers.

The Brave New World framework

IQVIA: You’ve often spoken and written about the industry being in a “Brave New World.” What does that mean?

Luke: We are in a before-and-after time for our industry. So much is happening—from policy changes and launch challenges to changing investment dynamics and difficult patient journeys as people navigate the healthcare system. Add to that the rapid changes in technology and AI. It’s harder today than ever before to be a successful brand manager.

Think about the past decade, and ask yourself, “What drove success?” It was mega blockbusters like large oncology products or immunology products. In the next five years, more of those products are coming to losses of exclusivity. You also have intense competition, with many immunology products facing a dozen competitive products within these indications.

IQVIA: How does the next decade look different?

Luke: Look at the modern blockbusters we’ve seen. Obesity treatments like Wegovy, Mounjaro, and Zepbound are the fastest launches we have ever observed. Yet the patient population they’re addressing is just getting started since less than 10% of the eligible population has received treatment.

Now think about the spillover effects. Those are also diabetes patients and cardiovascular patients. They have comorbidities around osteoarthritis and sleep apnea. As that treatment accelerates, how does that spill over and affect other areas?

Beyond that, the Inflation Reduction Act introduces new variables on product lifespan. It’s no longer about indication sequencing. Now the goal is to stack indications end to end to lengthen a lifespan. That means you must bring as much value forward as you possibly can in a product’s lifecycle. But to build an indication stack that brings value forward, you have to run multiple clinical trials.

That means as a brand manager, you could potentially be launching 6 to 10 indications in a two-year period. Think about the complexity that adds. It quickly magnifies all of this decision-making to become really challenging.

The AI imperative

IQVIA: What role does AI play in navigating these dynamics?

Luke: It’s all about patterns and data. It’s impossible for a human brain to comprehend the amount of information that’s out there. You have to use advanced data processing techniques and AI to look at bigger and bigger sets of data with improved speed. Without that, we’re not going to understand what’s happening in the market and what’s driving the behavior of that market.

We are on the cusp of being able to unlock many new metrics, analytics, and methodologies that help us understand that behavior. Only these AI tools give us the power to do that. If we don’t use them, we’re not going to be able to successfully transition, and the strategies that worked over the last decade are not going to work in this next one.

Strategic partnership in practice

IQVIA: Given everything we’ve discussed, how should brand leaders approach strategic partnerships differently?

Luke: As a brand leader, I used to bring in my partners to sit in strategic planning sessions. We engaged them very early in the decision-making process so they could provide guidance along the way. If a brand leader is treating partners as vendors and relegating them to decisions that are after the fact—expecting them to respond to strategies that have been years in the making—that’s very difficult.

IQVIA is unique in that we sit on the best information in the industry, bar none. But beyond that, we’re also using this ourselves, partnering with clients to understand new ways to think about information. And we’re making major investments in technology and infrastructure to speed access and make it easier to gain access to that information.

Thriving in the new reality

The brand strategies that drove success over the past decade—relying on mega-blockbusters, traditional measurement approaches, and vendor-based partnerships—are giving way to a new paradigm built on real-time insights, predictive capabilities, and true strategic collaboration.

To thrive in the Brave New World, brand leaders need to embrace the speed of modern analytics, understand the interconnectedness of market dynamics, and leverage strategic partnerships to navigate complexity rather than simply manage it. The transformation is already underway. The question for each brand leader is whether they’re going to lead it or be left behind.

If you haven’t already, please read the first part of our interview with Luke, The Brand Manager's Perfect Storm: Why Traditional Strategies Are Failing.