Tuesday 22 February 2011

Hitting The Rx Nerve


When I inherited my cubicle from a fellow senior product manager, what I also inherited was a right hand corner decked with brand packs which I replaced with mine by artistically placing my vancomycin capsule pack (privileged to be the ‘only one’) over two injection packs. Every day I take my Teicoplanin brand by my left hand and ask him “Darling, When will you be a Lipitor?” (Lipitor syndrome is something that every product manager of my generation is infected with). One day it replied unceremoniously ‘fool, when you could hit a billion Rx nerves’. What…..? Where does this come from?
                            For a product manager, a product in front of him is a packet of information rather than it being a vial or a capsule or a tablet and what he does is disseminating this information. This postmanisque job is so complex that a product manager often smacks his head to eject fumes out of his ear. Question is what makes him do so? What make his work so challenging?  Is it 150 competitors in his therapy waiting to swallow him? Or is it sheer price competition where if you come up with a Rs 10 brand, the next day three other pop out with their Rs 3 substitute?  Or is the humongous regulatory pressure where even your sneezing has to be followed by ten explanatory notes? The answer is a simple, blatant ‘NO’. The only one thing he should bother about is how fast and frequent he sensitizes the Rx nerve of his customer. If he could do this, the other problems would be taken care of by it. 
                           Rx nerve is something which is responsible for doctor’s prescription, stockist’s distribution, chemist’s purchase and patient’s consumption of your brand. What is that a product manager required doing is to sensitize this nerve frequently and it is nothing else but information that makes this happen. Now let’s think about the complexity of this process. The challenge lies where a product manager has to find out information and catapult this through the apt selected medium with the required force at efficient frequency to sensitize the Rx nerve of a customer. Each bold letter above is a huge challenge and improvisation of each make one product manager different from other. What make the situation more complex is the fact that each individual customer require different sort of information to sensitize their Rx nerve. Don’t you think it is easy. I bet you do….