Mike Rea, CEO of IDEA Pharma, has worked on some successful new drug and medical product launches over the last 20 years.
His new book, Pharmaceutical Positioning (now available on Amazon), is he claims, the world’s first book on positioning pharmaceuticals.
As a discipline, positioning emerged in the 20th century as a powerful concept in product and brand marketing. This book, for the first time ever, applies proven and new positioning methods to pharmaceuticals. This book captures many of the lessons on positioning that underpins successful development and launch. Whether your product is first to create a new market, or fifth into an old market, positioning is a fundamental part of whether or not your product will be successful, and how successful it will be.
Rea said: “The 1980 Ries and Trout book on Positioning has served us well, but it has never really fitted pharma. Given the importance of what we do, the opportunity to rethink positioning for a pharmaceutical audience is critical – to increase the relevance of great positioning for what we develop, as well as how we communicate it. They said ‘positioning is not what you do to a product.’ I counter that it is absolutely what you do to a product – in fact, it is everything that you do to help a molecule become a product.”
Cheryl MacDiarmid, Senior Vice President, Head of Global Commercial Strategy, ViiV Healthcare said: “Pharmaceutical Positioning provides an important update to the classic Ries and Trout. Here, positioning is about both the product and the mind of the consumer, something that is so critical for pharma to grasp – I have sent a copy to all of my department”.
