The Challenge
A mid-sized, growth-oriented biopharmaceutical company that develops ready-to-use therapies needed to reallocate its marketing budget across three brands ahead of the annual planning cycle. Marketing spend ran across several channels—paid digital, conferences, speaker programs, paid search—with no unified system for tracking each channel’s return. The company needed to:
- Quantify how much new prescription volume comes from paid media spend on the company’s high-volume brand.
- Reallocate budget across channels based on incremental prescriptions performance.
- Understand how marketing reaches prescribers on two rare-disease brands, where referral volume is too low for a statistical model.
- Bring spend, media delivery, CRM, event, and prescription data from separate systems onto one timeline and one cost basis.
- Provide leadership with defensible recommendations for current and future actions.
The Solution
Aspect built a marketing effectiveness analysis that combines statistical modeling and analysis, fitting the method to each brand’s data.
- Bayesian marketing mix model on the high-volume brand: over two years of weekly national new prescriptions against working spend on ten channels, with holiday, plan-year, category, and field-force controls, and alternative model specifications to show which channel findings hold across prior, baseline, and carryover assumptions.
- Prescriber-level reach and engagement reads on the two rare-disease brands: every marketing touch carrying a prescriber identifier was ordered against that prescriber’s first referral, so the analysis shows which channels reach referrers, in what sequence, and how far ahead of the referral.
- Unified data foundation spanning media warehouse, CRM call and email records, conference and speaker program ledgers, and prescription data: created one weekly timeline and one cost basis so every channel could be compared on equal terms.
- Executive readout with per-brand and cross-brand recommendations, every figure traceable to a recorded model or analysis output.
Results
- Paid media accounts for approximately 5 to 15 percent of new prescriptions on the high-volume brand, so the available gain is in the channel mix. Speaker programs buy a prescriptionfor less than the digital channels, and the model supports a bounded reallocation from consumer programmatic and social toward speaker programs and HCP programmatic, worth about 1% more incremental prescriptions on a fixed budget. Aspect’s recommendation: focus reallocation on the channel mix rather than pursuing additional budget and shift spend from consumer digital channels toward speaker programs and HCP programmatic shift spend from consumer programmatic and social toward speaker programs and HCP programmatic.
- Conferences are the largest channel in the budget and the largest contributor in the model. Reading the weeks around the largest meetings against the rest of the window shows the whole category writing more in those weeks, the competing product more than the client’s brand, with the brand’s share of the category unchanged. Conferences move the market rather than the brand’s position in it. The model controls for category-wide movement, so the conference contribution is the brand’s own, and it costs about the media average per incremental prescription. Aspect’s recommendation: fund conferences as presence at current spend levels.
- On one rare-disease brand, the client learned that face-to-face calls reach nearly every referrer before they refer, so coverage is not the gap. The referral rate rises more than tenfold from no visits to ten or more, and the gradient holds with clinical demand fixed. Prescribers who refer again received roughly 60% more calls in the year after their first referral than those who did not. Display already reaches most referrers with no referral signal from added exposure, so that spend holds. Aspect’s recommendation: maintain field presence and manage it on call intensity rather than expanding reach.
- On the other rare-disease brand, the client learned that a third of referrers were reached by no channel before referring. Aspect’s recommendation: shift budget toward field and inside coverage, and redirect approved email to demand-flagged prescribers, whose alerts run a median of eight months ahead of a first referral.
The Aspect Advantage
- Method matched to volume: Aspect built a Bayesian marketing mix model for products where volume supported it and prescriber-level reach reads where it didn’t — giving the client statistically sound answers instead of a one-size-fits-all analysis that would have overreached on the smaller brands.
- A unified data foundation: Aspect brought together media warehouse, CRM call and email records, conference and speaker program ledgers, and prescription data — spanning multiple disconnected systems — onto one weekly timeline and one cost basis, so every channel could be compared on equal terms.
- Defensible, traceable recommendations: Aspect matched every figure in the executive readout to a recorded model or analysis output, giving leadership recommendations grounded in data.
- A forward plan: Aspect designed low-cost experiments (randomized holdouts, territory-level digital reporting) that will turn unmeasured channels into measured ones by the next planning cycle.