Why do so many drug launches not meet their expectations?

In 2014 McKinsey’s reported that about two-thirds of drug launches did not meet pre-launch sales expectations for their first year on the market.

More recently, the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions studied 284 new drug launches in the USA between 2012-2021 and found that one-third missed their first-year sales expectations. Why?

It is impossible to pin it down to one factor.

Both McKinsey’s and Deloitte believe a major contributor is ‘muscle-power’. Arguing that bigger, more experienced and well-established businesses are simply better launch machines.

Whilst that may, or may not, be the case, we’d like to put another single factor on the table.

In our experience, too few new product planning and launch teams worry about the ‘Diffusion of Innovation’ curve and what it means for their product or service.

In the 1960s Everett Rodgers first put forward a theory that there are five different types of respondents in any community for an innovation. He provided evidence that has been tested thousands of times across hundreds of sectors over the past 60 years; and it’s the basis upon which most businesses now plan their product launches.

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Too few new product planning and launch teams worry about the ‘Diffusion of Innovation’ curve and what it means for their product or service.

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Rodgers found that when a new product, idea, or service is launched, the first types of users are the innate innovators in that community. They’re the people who typically experiment with new ideas anyway, and are very quick to try anything new, and as quick to drop them in favour of something fresher.

The next group of early users he called opinion leaders (or early adopters). These people are more serious and considered in their actions. They invest time and effort in exploring the innovation. They afford it full consideration, and once they’ve completed their assessment, they share their findings with their peers. Interestingly, their peers find them a trusted source of advice and opinion – so much more so than the manufacturer of the innovation.

In the life sciences, although Rodger’s work is theoretically understood, it seems to be rarely followed. The behavioural dimension of how innovations are adopted seems to be overlooked.

We have found that new product planning teams are keen to identify KOLs during the R&D development process: for advice, support and endorsement. However, once launched, teams veer towards performance metrics that measure their activity in the marketplace. Why else would SoSV – Share of the Scientific Voice, or SoDV – Share of the Digital Voice be something to boast about? “Noise” is neither a measure nor a substitute for impact.

The brutal reality of launching a new healthcare innovation in today’s environment is that most of the customers you want to attract into considering, trialling and then using your innovation are highly unlikely to be swayed into changing their habits because you’ve got a higher share of the noise.

They don’t trust the manufacturer’s hype. They will, however, listen to people they trust; usually in meetings where the manufacturer is not present, and form their judgements in the quiet of a professional community.

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Engaging efficiently and effectively with the opinion leaders in every discipline – whether physicians, clinicians, economists, patient groups or others - is a non-negotiable in seeking to get rapid adoption of an innovation at launch.

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They’re different in every region and country of the world.

Find them, engage, educate and support them, and in their own way (without fanfare or notice), they will be the ones to light the blue touchpaper that will help your launch become one of the successful ones.