In today’s crowded and fast-moving competitive landscape, getting segmentation right is more critical than ever to ensure ROI optimization for your business investment – whether it is investment in communication, activation, innovation or engagement and brand building. In addition, fueled by pandemic-accelerated digital adoption, strategically incorporating digital attitudes and behaviors into segmentation is the key to success in this new environment.
Shapiro+Raj recently worked with our client team at a top-10 big pharmaceutical company to develop a future-proofed digital segmentation schema to guide their 5–10-year innovation initiatives in the type-2 diabetes (T2D) space.
The T2D market is hyper-competitive, with minimal clinical differentiation. Physicians choose therapies based on access and ingrained heuristics, with very little loyalty towards brands. Against this backdrop, our client had an injectable therapy that was struggling with market share in the low teens. What’s more, competitors were touting better adherence data, planning imminent launches of new oral therapy, and had an expansive future pipeline. Facing these significant headwinds, our client wanted to look ‘beyond the pen’ to create value via digital services and support with the aim to become the leader in digital innovation and grow their share in the CVRM space.
Their goal was to create products/services that uniquely solved a compelling need. This meant that we had to identify the Strategic Value Target (SVT) – who would be the critical drivers of the future category? What meaningful problem(s) did they need solved? What intrinsic and extrinsic factors presented opportunities or hurdles in terms of design, accessibility? As you would expect, this was not a homogenous market; life stage, lifestyles, technological adoption or acumen, intrinsic and extrinsic elements, all led to different HCP & patient solutions.
To address this business need, we recommended a comprehensive, globally validated, and actionable digital segmentation that identified and brought to life T2D patients and physicians, and their adoption of digital devices. Furthermore, this segmentation had to be future-proofed as it was the foundation that guided and fueled an innovation engine that would inspire their next-generation solutions.
At Shapiro+Raj, operating in the ‘future-now’ mindset is a core part of our DNA. To crack this ask for a future-proof digital segmentation, our credentialed social scientists, seasoned data analysts and battle-tested business strategists crafted a 3-phase strategic learning agenda, packed with next-gen methods, powered by advanced ML/AI analytics, and enriched with foresights from healthcare and digital futurists.
We recruited PCPs, Endocrinologists, and a mix of patients with type-1 and type-2 diabetes to understand the impact and expectations at different stages and across different constituents. In addition, we used our proprietary S+R’s PROsician™ and PROtient™ algorithms – developed based on Alvin Toffler and Everett Rogers brilliance - the Diffusion of Innovation theory and the concept of the professional consumer. This allowed us to ensure we were able to capture a very accurate cross-section of our client’s customers.
We began with a ‘Discovery’ phase that included mining for pertinent insights from the client’s historical research, leveraging our proprietary ML/AI-powered S+R AQuA™ analytics platform, robust secondary research, KOL interviews with Healthcare Digital Futurists and leaders in the Diabetes space, and internal stakeholder interviews across key functions. This was to help us identify the needs of the key stakeholders and better understand the injectable Diabetes space.
Based on the learnings from the Discovery phase, we dove into ‘Explore’ - a qualitative exploratory phase to identify most meaningful segmentation ‘feeders’, especially from a needs-based perspective. The S+R team interviewed a mix of patient types and physicians (PCPs and Endocrinologists) across multiple global markets. Using a combination of projective techniques and probes to encourage first person storytelling, we generated a set of unmet needs for both respondent types.
These unmet needs and a broader set of segmentation attributes were then utilized in ‘Segment’ - a quantitative phase where we employed the “Jobs to be Done” framework, assessing two key aspects: (1) The importance of various desired outcomes; (2) The degree to which these outcomes are satisfied today. The segmentation questionnaire also included a set of questions exploring current digital usage and attitudes, both related to Diabetes and more generally. Answers to the attitudinal and behavioral aspects in the digital space helped enrich our understanding by predicting their likelihood to adopt digital innovations. The deep knowledge capital that our researchers and strategists bring added depth to our segmentation findings beyond the primary research data, enabling us to uncover deeper opportunities within each respondent type.
Our multi-phase research uncovered five digital segments for both physicians and patients in the Diabetes space, based on unmet needs, attitudes towards Diabetes care, and likelihood to uptake a digital innovation. These segments were brought to life through an understanding of their needs, wants, and who they are at their core. We prioritized Strategic Value Targets for our client by taking into consideration both the size of the segment and the size of their unmet needs, as well as the type of individuals who make up each segment. For example, though the largest segment of patients had few unmet needs, we recommended that our client target these customers as they are ‘innovators’ and ‘early adopters’, i.e., amongst the first to buy into new, innovative technology when it comes to managing their Diabetes; as such, helping to accelerate the speed and scale of innovation adoption.
As a result of our work, the client team was able to leverage the understanding of customer segments to target the biggest opportunity SVT for their digital innovations. Although the products are in the final developmental stage, they include features and capabilities that are built on in-depth understanding of core unmet needs of both patients and physicians, definitely improving the odds of in-market success.
To learn more about how we can help you spark transformative outcomes in the digital space and beyond, please contact us at communications@shapiroraj.com
Shapiro+Raj
S+R is a research and strategy firm that uses social and behavioral sciences to solve the toughest business and marketing challenges for our clients to help them win in the INSIGHT ECONOMY™. Our next-gen methods dig deep to unlock market-ready insights. Then our brand planners turn these into strategic marketplace actions that create brand evolution and innovation; customer experiences and loyalty; and new platforms for growth.
