A Strategic View Of The Economic Effects Of COVID-19

The coronavirus pandemic and responses in battling COVID-19 have created never-before-seen challenges for the pharma industry, such as public policy mandates (e.g., shelter-in-place orders, closing of non-essential businesses) and sweeping restrictions placed on industry representatives from entering offices and hospitals to see HCPs. These policy mandates and restrictions have generated an unprecedented adverse economic situation and caused companies to rethink their go-to-market strategy. The International Monetary Fund recently noted in their April 2020 World Economic Outlook, The Great Lockdown, that “the world economy will experience the worst recession since the Great Depression.”

This webinar will conduct a strategic view on how the generation of economic effects from policy responses to COVID-19 are reflected through two critical processes: brand financial forecasting and marketing-mix analysis.

• Part 1: Discuss and measure how brand financial forecasts can be adversely affected by COVID-19.
  We will demonstrate the development of an urban-level econometrically estimated inferential new prescription brand model, specified with management control and economic variables. This model is then used to predict generated drag effects on brand financial forecasts from a COVID-19 recession. The prediction model will also show how changes in sales, marketing, and payer-related channels can be implemented and measured to mitigate brand financial drag effects.
• Part 2: Examine how a deep recession and continued industry representative access restrictions to see HCPs affect the optimal mix of commercialization activities. Pharma sales and marketing is evolving due to COVID-19, such as changes in sales rep access restrictions at physician offices and hospitals, greater use of digital channels to compensate for this decline in access to continue sales rep/HCP engagement, use of digital channels by HCPs as a means to acquire product information, potential changes in DTC spending to reflect patients decreasing their visits to their doctor, and a greater use of samples, copay cards, and other support programs to meet patient affordability and loss of insurance issues caused by the recession. Subject to caveats that pretty much everything is a bit uncertain (this is the first global pandemic for most of the living population), these changes will be analyzed by how they affect marketing mix optimization, scenario planning for budget allocation, and the measurement of budget trade-offs.