Evaluating the potential of a pre-launch product in a real-life setting

Research Partnership specialises in providing custom market research and consulting for global healthcare. Our client was developing a new product for treating Type 2 diabetes, which they were preparing for launch. In an increasingly competitive diabetes market, with new brands and formulations frequently becoming available, our client needed to determine the unmet needs of current type 2 diabetes patients and identify where the greatest opportunity lay for their new product. With the use of a mixed methodology that incorporated mobile research, our research provided the client with the in-depth insights they needed to plan a successful launch.

A two-phase approach was used in order to understand the current market and how it would evolve in future. In-depth-interviews with patients and physicians were conducted in order to explore the market, collect reactions to the product profile and develop hypotheses about where it should be positioned. We then wanted to collect information about the patient profiles where physicians would and wouldn’t use the new product, as close as possible to a real-life clinical setting. For this, we used a SmartPhone app to collect real patient cases from physicians. For each case, we asked the likelihood to use the new product for that patient and, critically, collected the rationale behind their decision, using spoken-word to capture rich information.

In addition to how the conventional methodology identified the unmet needs and challenges in this competitive market, the innovative app-based approach allowed us to determine the patient segments that demonstrated the greatest opportunity for the product. The use of a mobile app gave our client data at the point where physicians make prescribing decisions, providing them with the ability to assess likely use of the product in a real-life prescribing scenario and to start building both a physician and patient segmentation. The overall research findings provided the client with the in-depth insights they required in order to plan a successful launch.