UCB

Creating a global Neupro brand strategy for UCB for patients, physicians and employees

Challenge

Parkinson’s is a disease of certain loss but with a high degree of uncertainty regarding progression. There are no objective measures for evaluating wellbeing. Tolerability and effectiveness of treatment are subjective.

UCB is recognised as a leader in neurology despite more limited resources and expenditure than many of its larger competitors. However, local activations and communications around Neupro were highly inconsistent from market to market and varied in success.

Our task was to create a global Neupro brand strategy to give clarity to patients, physicians and employees and to further progress the business towards its goal of becoming a patient preferred biopharma leader.

Clarity

Success required sensitivity to stakeholder needs and multiple touchpoints. From engaging with country teams to understand local opportunities and pitfalls to immersing with physicians to deconstruct the treatment journey and the role of quality-of-life.

We needed to achieve a balance between a more disruptive patient-first perspective and a closer-in clinical-focused strategy.

Crucially, whatever brand strategy we produced needed to be easily understood by payers, physicians and many internal stakeholders.

Creating an emotive patient-centric brand strategy that delivers clarity

Solution

Our Growth Map sat at the heart of the new global brand strategy, built around two dimensions. One determined primarily by disease stage and speed of progression, to ensure the patient would ultimately be recognisable to healthcare professionals. And a subjective need lens which captured what the patient wanted from their treatment and quality-of-life to bridge the understanding gap with physicians.

This framework, embedded as part of a global summit, delivered the clarity of a single-minded opportunity space. One that delivered the promise of future dollars and the potential for distinctive Neupro brand strategy, positioning and messaging in an increasingly congested marketplace.

The only way of guaranteeing the longevity of the brand strategy was to cascade this throughout UCB’s multi-layered structure and demonstrate its commercial and patient benefit to those on the front-line.

A series of training workshops and test and learn feedback from the field allowed us to refine the activation and bring clarity of story for both physicians and the reps selling to them.

Impact

With no prospect of an improved prognosis, anything that maintains a Parkinson’s patient’s independence and quality of life is a “win”.

By wrapping an emotive patient-centric story around Neupro’s continuous 24-hour delivery and symptom predictability, Clear delivered positioning clarity for patients, physicians and internal stakeholders.

The targeted patient mindset now sits at the heart of all Neupro communications and messaging strategy.

In 2018, Neupro hit a new sales peak, and is still growing.