Thai-Hoa Pham, President B.I Pharma Laboratoires
Most pharmaceutical companies accept the decline of mature products as an economic law. Budgets shift toward new launches. Field forces are redeployed. The product keeps generating revenue, quietly, until one day it does not.
I used to think this was rational portfolio management. After running a six-month hybrid promotion pilot with an international pharmaceutical laboratory, I think differently now.
The decline, in many cases, is not a market signal. It is a commercial decision. And decisions can be revisited.
The laboratory that came to us had a product with solid clinical history. Physicians knew it. Pharmacists stocked it. Prescription patterns were stable but slowly declining.
The reason was not competition. It was not a label issue. It was absence. Systematic face-to-face visits had stopped. The product had become invisible in the commercial conversation between the company and its prescribers.
Share of voice was falling. Top of mind was eroding. And with each quarter of silence, a little more of the brand’s commercial relevance was quietly lost.
The question the laboratory brought to us was precise: is it possible to maintain presence and reverse that trend without rebuilding a traditional field force?
The word hybrid is used so broadly in pharmaceutical promotion that it has almost lost meaning. I want to be specific about what we designed.
The model had two structured components.
What made the combination effective was not the individual channels but the coherence between them. Remote contact created context and familiarity. Congress presence transformed that familiarity into genuine professional relationship. Each reinforced the other.
The prescribers we engaged did not experience this as two separate activities. They experienced it as continuous, relevant presence from a brand they had not heard from in months.
We agreed on a six-month horizon. At the end of it, the laboratory asked us not to stop.
Three things stood out in the results.
Share of voice held. Among the targeted prescriber segments, brand presence in professional conversations was maintained at a level comparable to what active field force support had historically generated, at a fraction of the cost per contact.
Top of mind was measurably preserved. Physicians who had been in the program recalled the product spontaneously at rates significantly higher than those outside it. The commercial silence had been broken. The product was back in the conversation.
The congress effect was real. Prescribers who had been contacted remotely and then met at a regional congress reported a qualitatively different experience than either channel alone would have produced. The remote contact made the congress encounter meaningful. The congress made the remote contact credible.
Before we recommended this model to any laboratory, we tested it internally on products from our own portfolio, for which we are the pharmaceutical operator in France and carry full commercial accountability.
That matters for a simple reason. When you are the MAH, you are not advising, you are deciding and measuring results. The consequences of a poorly designed engagement model are yours. That exposure produces a different quality of thinking than „classic“ advisory distance allows.
What we brought to this pilot was not a consulting framework developed in a meeting room. It was an approach we had already run, measured and refined on our own commercial operations.
In a market where CSOs compete primarily on price and headcount, this is the differentiation we believe actually matters: operational credibility, not just commercial capacity.
The mature product context is where this model is most visibly needed. But the same logic applies in a different, often overlooked situation: product launches targeting prescriber segments that the primary field force classifies as non-priority.
In every launch, resource allocation is concentrated on high-frequency, high-potential prescribers. That is correct. But it means that mid-tier segments receive no structured engagement during the critical first months. The launch ramp is slower than it needs to be. ROI is delayed. And by the time the field force attention reaches these segments, early prescribing habits have already formed around competitors.
Hybrid models can address this gap efficiently. Seated delegates can cover these segments at scale. Selective congress presence can create the clinical engagement moments that translate awareness into prescription intent. The cost structure makes it viable even when the expected volume does not justify traditional field force investment.
The concept of sustained growth anchors our positioning within the Global Alliance Pharma Solutions network. I want to describe it operationally, because that is where it either works or it does not.
Sustained growth requires three things working together: the right engagement model for the product’s lifecycle stage, applied with sufficient cadence to maintain commercial presence, and measured against KPIs that reflect actual prescriber behavior rather than activity metrics alone.
What the six-months pilot confirmed is that these three things are achievable with far less resource intensity than traditional promotion models suggest, provided the model is designed correctly and tested against real commercial conditions before deployment.
If you are managing a mature portfolio and the working assumption is that decline is inevitable, I would challenge that assumption directly.
The question is not whether your product can be sustained. The question is whether you have a partner who has already made it work and is prepared to show you the evidence.
With 20 years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry, in operational and management roles, Thaï-Hoa now heads up the B.I Pharma laboratory, which he founded. A pharmacist by training, he has solid expertise in marketing/sales of medicines and medical devices, as well as in regulatory affairs and pharmaceutical liability.
Together with Medhouse, Medipartner, icon Group AVANZIA PHARMA and the good healthcare group BI Pharma is part of the Global Alliance Pharma Solutions.
As Global Alliance Pharma Solutions we unite specialized partners across Europe and Latin America with deep local expertise and international ambition to create solutions that truly work.
As Global Alliance Pharma Solutions we unite specialized partners across Europe and Latin America with deep local expertise and international ambition to create solutions that truly work. Our mission is to deliver best-in-class, tailormade and professional go-to-market expertise. This is always in close collaboration with the healthcare community, the Life Science sector, patients and their caregivers.
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