Improving distribution penetration and awareness of branded medicines in rural India

Learning Launch:

Challenge: I work in a pharmaceutical company which sells branded medicines across different  therapeutic areas cross India and many more countries. Healthcare facilities in most countries,  including India, are better in cities and Tier I towns compared to smaller towns and villages. This is  applicable right from infrastructure of hospitals, diagnostics centres, and availability of branded  medicines at pharmacies. The intent was to provide access to good quality medicines to the patients  in smaller towns and thereby increasing sale of our branded medicines. However, it was believed that  patients in smaller towns prefer to use generic unbranded medicines which are cheaper than branded  medicines. Hence, most of the distribution points and sales force of pharmaceutical companies are  based in cities and tier I towns.

Selection: I had some data and a hypothesis which said that people in Tier II and below towns want  good quality medicines for their near and dear ones but branded medicines are not available easily in  these towns. I visited smaller towns in different states and interviewed patients, pharmacists, doctors  in these towns. Since I only had a hypothesis, a plan and an intent, I was not sure about the success of  the plan. The project will require a large field force when operations will be in full scale. That’s when  I selected learning launch tool to quickly experiment in the market place.

Application: I deployed a team of 9 members to start a pilot project in one of the states in India. Each  member had to visit doctors and pharmacists in 24 smaller towns, twice a month. The purpose was to  increase awareness and educate doctors about well-known branded medicines and to make our  branded medicines available at 3 to 4 pharmacies in these towns. The team had to also connect these  pharmacies to large distributors in the tier I towns who would supply medicines to these pharmacies.  Members from various functions like finance, distribution, strategy, human resources also visited  these towns along with the 9 members for insights. Data during the pilot was captured by the 9  member team in specific formats through a mobile application.

Insight:  Insights from the data captured in the mobile application and from the conversations with  doctors, patients and pharmacies were very encouraging. I found that there were a set of patients  that had prescription of a doctor that he/she visited in a city and purchased branded medicines which  were available in a pharmacy in the small town. There were also a few doctors in these towns who  prescribed branded medicines to a few patients when they wanted a quick recovery. These doctors  also preferred branded medicines in certain therapies. Such insights helped in selecting well-known  brands in specific therapeutic areas to be promoted in these markets.

Approach: The tool that I selected, “Learning Launch”, helped me in proving my hypothesis and  making necessary changes in the go to market strategy. In this case, selection of brands in specific  therapeutic areas was very important and selecting specific states, where health care was not well  penetrated in Tier II and below towns, was important. The insights from the pilot also helped in  creating mechanism to connect the pharmacies in these towns to distributors in the larger towns.  There were also changes done in the mobile application to capture sale and process metrics data and  in designing dashboards. The approach helped in scaling up the project to 8 different states within 6  months which helped in additional growth of 5% in sale for these branded medicines. There was a  greater satisfaction that good quality and affordable medicines were made available to patients across  the length and breadth of these states.

Submitted by Gopal Kumar on 31st January 2021

