A New Approach to Market Understanding: What One Launch Revealed

Picture this. You know your therapeutic area well. You’ve conducted some market research, talked to physicians, built the assumptions your strategy runs on. But what happens when all of that – real, credible knowledge, still leaves you with questions? This session tells the real story of a Canadian specialty pharma launch that began exactly there: a small team, a tight budget, and genuine on-the-ground knowledge that still left real gaps in understanding the audience and the patient journey. It follows what happened when those gaps were closed. Not with more of the same research, but with a different way of looking, and how the answers that surfaced kept reshaping the team’s understanding well past launch day. We’ll walk through: 

• The real, credible knowledge the team already had, a physician field survey and direct conversations with GPs, FMs, and GI specialists, and the gaps that knowledge still left, wide enough for smart people to land in different places on strategy 

• What became visible once the team looked directly at real, unprompted patient experience and information – a clearer picture of the patient journey, and a misdiagnosis pattern hiding in plain sight 

• Why a second, deeper look months later didn’t close the story but reopened it, confirming that the market you’re marketing to keeps changing the moment you act in it 

Knowing your audience isn’t a box to check before launch. It’s a discipline that keeps paying off, especially when the true patient experience rarely makes it into the original plan.