Eli Lilly and Company is an American pharmaceutical company headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana, with offices in 18 countries. Its products are sold in approximately 125 countries. Lilly's notable achievements include being the first company to mass-produce the polio vaccine and one of the first pharmaceutical companies to produce human insulin using recombinant DNA including Humulin. Lilly unites caring with discovery to create medicines that make life better for people around the world.
In recent years, Eli Lilly launched a new product for the treatment of adult patients with moderate-to-severe rheumatoid arthritis. This constituted a new therapeutic area for Lilly within which they had no heritage or track record. Rheumatoid arthritis remains one of the most competitive areas within the pharmaceutical market with multiple blue-chip competitors.
As documented by multiple studies, the first 6 months of a launch is critical. Accordingly, it was recognized by Lilly that a traditional launch model utilizing conventional tactics and channels, such as advisory boards, face-to-face detailing and congresses, would not suffice.
Vertic’s strategy began with considerations for a digital brand architecture that would empower each individual brand to accelerate the sales cycle increase operational excellence and utilize learnings to enhance the end-to-end customer experience. Defining distinct brand positioning for each of Hyster and Yale would reduce messaging cannibalization between the brands and minimize buyer confusion in the decision making process, closing the opportunity gap for HYG to drive customer centricity.
The strategy furthermore needed to leverage a powerful global storytelling platform that could simultaneously showcase the strong legacy of the two brands with their tireless innovation in materials handling solutions, while always being tailored to the individual needs of their markets.
Vertic’s observational digital landscaping exercise was aimed at developing a full multichannel understanding of customers and competitors as part of the pre-launch planning and as a supplement to classic interrogative market research.
Digital Landscaping
Vertic mapped the current digital landscape, the digital customer behavior, and the competitive environment – all to gain a further understanding of how to be best meet the future stakeholders’ needs in a digital world. The digital landscaping insights project was executed in numerous local markets to understand commonalities and local differences needed to craft a Multichannel Launch Strategy.
Multichannel Launch Strategy
The Multichannel Launch strategy aimed at exploring and evaluating digital opportunities in relation to marketing objectives and stakeholder needs in selected local markets. More than 20 different potential execution ideas and concepts (online and offline) including detailed descriptions of potential content elements, formats and channels were fleshed out during the strategy process, as well as Vertic’s guidance and recommendations for digital marketing for traffic driving, distribution and measurement of tactics through a KPI framework.
Execution and Tactics
To further boil down the tactics defined as outcomes of the strategy project, we evaluated each in terms of commonalities encompassing the region, added value across the customer decision journey, and ability to execute in time for launch.
A total of 5 tactics was selected and over 100 content pieces were developed ranging from full digital solutions, SoMe campaigns to print invitations and congress booth experiences. All of these content pieces and concepts were linked together in primary customer flows across channels and a detailed Play Book was created for local and flexible deployment by affiliates
