Your launch strategy has never met the competition

Pharmaceutical launch plans are often thoroughly researched, carefully costed, and internally aligned. The problem is that they are usually tested against a market that stays still.

Have you seen those Black Friday videos where shoppers scramble for a heavily discounted television? They are brutal. Everyone arrives knowing what they want and at least some of them have worked out exactly how they intend to get it.

I once saw an interview with an eager shopper confidently explaining his strategy before the doors opened. He knew where the television would be, which route he would take, and how quickly he could reach it. There was just one rather large problem: hundreds of other people wanted the same television and many of them had a strategy too.

That is the bit we sometimes miss in launch planning. Your strategy does not enter an empty room. It arrives at the same time as everyone else's.

The thought came back during a Monday morning video call with my business partner. We were discussing the extraordinary obesity market: oral GLP-1s, new combinations, new mechanisms, and injections designed to be taken less frequently. A staggering 16 new obesity medicines could launch by 2029, flooding an already highly contested market.

That is 16 products potentially heading for the same set of doors, each supported by a team with a competitive strategy for winning market share. Each will have a forecast, a positioning, and a very convincing explanation of why it should succeed.

But this will not be an equal 16-way split. Some products will lead, some will secure a valuable niche, some will disappoint and some may barely get through the door. The strategies cannot all be right at the same time because each company's forecast depends, at least partly, on taking opportunity away from somebody else.

That is where apparently sensible strategies fail. They understand the prize, the customer, and their own route to success. What they have never properly met is the competition.

Launch has become a contested environment

The number of compounds in active development has doubled over the past decade, according to McKinsey, while the interval between launches is shortening. The market anticipated during early planning may be obsolete by the time a product reaches it.

At the same time, launch performance remains difficult. Deloitte's analysis of 284 US drug launches between 2012 and 2021 found that around one third missed expectations. Its wider research into launch failure found limited market access was the most commonly cited factor, followed by an inadequate understanding of market and customer needs and poor product differentiation.

The pattern appears elsewhere. Bain found that nearly half of the launches it examined underperformed analyst expectations. More recently, a ZS study of 340 launches found that even one-third of clinically differentiated products were still falling short three years after launch. Strong science matters enormously, but it cannot compensate automatically for the commercial system around it.

These findings matter because the opportunity to correct courses is limited. IQVIA's launch excellence research indicates that the first six months have a disproportionate influence on the later performance of at least 80% of launches. A weak start is not necessarily fatal, but significant changes in trajectory are uncommon.

This creates an uncomfortable contradiction. The industry spends years preparing a launch, yet, consequential assumptions are often tested only after customers, competitors, and healthcare systems begin reacting. By then, learning is expensive and the clock is already running.

The problem with the static launch plan

Most launch plans contain a competitor section. It may include product profiles, timelines, SWOT analyses, market research, and forecasts. All of this is useful, but it often treats competition as information, rather than behaviour. A competitor is not a column in a slide. It is an organisation making choices.

It may alter sequencing, defend priority accounts, reshape its value story, accelerate contracting, or reposition a mature brand. It may behave differently from what seems logical because it has different capabilities, incentives, and constraints.

A conventional plan can describe payers, pathways, customers, and competitors and still fail to show how they interact. It presents one preferred future while every competitor is busy trying to create a different one.

Strategy needs contact before launch

This is where strategic simulation, often called ‘wargaming’, can add value. The military language sometimes creates the wrong impression. The purpose is not theatrical confrontation or attempting to predict the future with certainty. It is to expose a strategy to intelligent opposition before the market does it for real.

In a well-designed simulation, cross functional teams represent the company, competitors, customers, payers, or system stakeholders. They receive evidence, objectives, and constraints, then make decisions as events unfold. The central question changes from, ‘Is our strategy convincing?’ to, ’What happens when other actors respond to it?’

And that distinction is crucial. A message that performs well in isolated research may weaken when a competitor reframes the decision. An access strategy may stall against local capacity and a proposed differentiator may prove easy to imitate. The exercise reveals which assumptions are carrying too much weight and where the plan depends on a competitor doing nothing.

A simulation is only as good as its design

Poorly designed wargames can generate energy, but little action. Three principles help avoid that.

First, the simulation must be grounded in evidence. Competitor teams should act from credible intelligence about capabilities, incentives, and likely objectives, not caricatures. Customer and payer responses should reflect genuine insight and system realities.

Second, it must test decisions, rather than invite general discussion. Teams need choices, trade-offs, limited resources, and consequences. If every option can be pursued simultaneously, the exercise will not reveal priorities.

Third, the output must connect directly to execution. The most useful result is not a long report describing what happened in the room. It is a sharper set of strategic choices, challenged assumptions, defined triggers, and practical responses with clear ownership.

This might include signs that a competitor is accelerating a claim, that local access is becoming the rate limiting step, or that the organisation should change its channel, evidence, or account strategy. Teams can agree what they will monitor, who will decide, and which responses can be prepared before urgency removes the space for good judgement.

From annual planning to competitive readiness

Strategic simulation should not replace forecasting, market research, or brand planning. It makes those disciplines work harder by forcing them into contact with one another and reveals when different functions are planning for different versions of the same market.

Medical may be anticipating one evidence threshold, market access another pathway response, and commercial a different pattern of customer adoption. A simulation makes those differences visible while there is still time to resolve them.

The objective is not a perfect prediction. Markets are too complex for that. The objective is readiness: a strategy robust enough to survive plausible challenges and an organisation able to recognise change early.

Pharmaceutical companies rightly ask whether their launch strategy is evidence based, differentiated, and executable. There is another question worth asking: has it ever encountered a competitor that wants the same customer, the same pathway, and the same patient?

On Black Friday, knowing where the television is located is only the beginning. The same is true in the coming GLP-1 bun fight. Sixteen products may come with 16 well-researched launch strategies, but the market will not politely divide itself into equal shares.

Your launch strategy may look excellent in the meeting room. The question is whether it still works once it has finally met the competition.

References

About the author

Alexis Besson is the founder of PharmaGambit, a strategic consultancy specialising in pharmaceutical launch strategy, competitive simulation, and wargaming. He has more than 20 years’ experience across pharma, medtech, and digital health, spanning sales, marketing, market access, and business development. Besson helps teams challenge assumptions, anticipate competitor behaviour, and build strategies that are ready for the realities of the market.