Healthcare Product Launch & Market Research Explained
Launching a new medical device in the competitive healthcare sector can be a complex process.
If you don’t fully understand the needs of the market, price your device correctly, or communicate its benefits effectively in your value proposition - it can reduce your chances of a successful launch.
By including market research throughout your design and development process, you give your device the best chance of meeting the needs of patients and healthcare professionals, standing out in a competitive market, and enjoying commercial success.
In this guide, we'll cover everything you need to know about launching a product successfully in the healthcare industry and how market research can help, including:
- The product lifecycle: How market research can make the difference
- How to develop a strong go-to-market strategy for your medical device launch
- Step 1: Executing brand equity research
- How to measure brand equity for a medical device
- Step 2: Performing a market assessment
- Step 3: Opting for healthcare market segmentation
- Step 4: Developing a strong value proposition
- How to develop a value proposition for your medical device
- Step 5: Conducting a price sensitivity analysis
- Step 6: Implementing usability testing
- Step 7: Testing communications effectiveness
- IDR Medical: Your healthcare pricing and marketing research company
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The product lifecycle: How market research can make the difference
Many view market research as a one-time task at the beginning of a product's lifecycle, solely to measure market potential.
This couldn’t be further from the truth.
Market research actually has an important part to play at every stage of the product development lifecycle:
1. Concept and feasibility
Healthcare market research is incredibly important here, as it helps to identify and segment your target market, gain insights into customer needs and pain points, and understand the market opportunities from analysis of existing products.
2. Design and development
Market research continues to play a valuable role in the design and development stage. User feedback from exploratory tests and assessment tests helps refine your product and ensure it meets the market's needs.
3. Verification and validation
Once you have a prototype device, conducting usability tests in a simulated environment can help identify and address any design flaws before regulatory submission.
4. Regulatory review and launch preparation
Before your medical device can be marketed or sold, it needs to have regulatory approval. Market research can help to gather the necessary usability data to support the approval process.
At this stage, market research can also help develop a pricing strategy and value proposition to help you achieve a successful market entry.
5. Launch and post-launch assessment
Market research shouldn’t end once your medical device has launched. Continuous market assessment can help you adapt to changes in the market, and identify improvements you can make to your product and positioning to ensure you remain competitive.
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How to develop a strong go-to-market strategy for your medical device launch
By including market research at every stage of your product development lifecycle, you naturally benefit from the data and insights you need to develop an effective go-to-market strategy.
Let’s examine some of the areas where market research can help ensure your device meets market demands and achieves commercial success.
Understanding the needs of the market
Market research can help you develop your go-to-market strategy by providing crucial insights into competitor products, the unmet needs of your target market, and customer pain points and preferences.
Concept testing and development
Through market research, concept testing provides valuable feedback from target users, helping to refine the product before significant resources are invested and avoiding costly post-launch product adjustments.
Positioning and value proposition
By understanding what different market segments value the most, market research enables you to tailor your messaging to more effectively resonate with your audience. You can also use market research to understand your brand equity and how different market segments perceive your brand - which can inform your pricing and communication strategy.
Pricing strategy
Setting the right price for your medical device is crucial for commercial success. Market research can help you determine the optimal pricing strategy for your device, ensuring it aligns with market demand and maximizes profitability.
Marketing and communication strategy
Another key aspect of a successful go-to-market strategy is developing an effective marketing and communication strategy that aligns with your market research findings.
Read on to find out more about how medical market research can help in each of these areas- starting with understanding your existing brand equity.
Step 1: Executing brand equity research
The strength of your brand equity influences a number of factors, including customer loyalty, your ability to set premium prices, and also how receptive the market might be to new product launches from your brand.
Many medical device manufacturers struggle with understanding and measuring their brand equity effectively, which can hinder the development of a successful branding strategy.
Investing in brand equity research helps you stand out in a competitive market, leading to faster adoption of new products and long-term success.
By regularly evaluating your brand equity, you can track the effectiveness of your marketing initiatives and make necessary adjustments to improve your brand's health and value.
How to measure brand equity for a medical device
At IDR Medical, we use the Brand Equity Wheel to help medical device manufacturers measure their brand equity and inform their product launches.
This framework measures four key dimensions, from which we calculate an overall brand equity score that provides a clear, measurable indication of your brand's health.
Brand awareness
Brand awareness measures how well your brand is recognized in the market. It includes both unprompted awareness (when customers recall your brand without any cues) and prompted awareness (when customers recognize your brand from a list of options). High brand awareness indicates a strong market presence and trust and familiarity with your products.
Brand positioning
Brand positioning evaluates how your brand stands out from competitors, looking at things like brand personality, perceived benefits, and organizational associations. By providing insights into your brand positioning, we can identify how far your brand is distinguishable and preferred over others.
Brand loyalty
This dimension looks at how loyal your customers are and how likely they are to continue choosing your brand over competitors. Loyal customers are more willing to pay higher prices and recommend your products to others, which can significantly impact the long-term success of your medical device.
Quality and Leadership
This dimension measures perceived quality and leadership in the industry.
A high score in this area suggests that customers trust your brand to deliver high-quality, cutting-edge products, which can translate into a competitive advantage when launching a new medical device.
The importance of regular evaluation
Measuring brand equity should not be a one-time project.
Regular evaluations allow you to monitor changes over time, track the impact of your branding efforts, and make data-driven decisions to enhance your brand.
Step 2: Performing a market assessment
Going ahead with a medical device product launch without understanding the market landscape can lead to you being taken by surprise by challenges, missing opportunities, and not having clarity about the true commercial potential for your product.
A thorough market assessment can provide valuable insights into market size, growth trends, competitive dynamics, and potential risks you may need to overcome.
This enables you to strategically plan your market entry better and have greater clarity about the commercial opportunity your new product or service presents.
At IDR Medical, we offer a range of market assessment services to ensure you mitigate any risks and can launch your medical device with complete confidence.
Step 3: Opting for healthcare market segmentation
Healthcare market segmentation is an area where market research can help you address the unique needs and preferences of different customer groups to improve the acceptance and performance of your medical device product launch.
If you don’t approach market segmentation effectively, your product may fail to resonate with key customer groups, resulting in reduced engagement and limited market success.
Using research-driven insights to inform all areas of the product development lifecycle, healthcare market segmentation can help you optimize key areas of your medical device launch, including:
- Product development
Adapting your product to meet the distinct needs of market segments, improving product acceptance. - Pricing strategies
Developing pricing models that maximize profitability for each segment. - Marketing and communication strategies
Crafting targeted marketing messages that resonate with specific audiences. - Strategic resource allocation
Focusing resources on the most profitable customer segments, ensuring efficient use of time and marketing budgets.
Step 4: Developing a strong value proposition
Your value proposition is another factor that influences the success of your medical device product launch.
A well-crafted value proposition should be simple, impactful, and easy to understand. It should clearly communicate how your product solves specific problems and meets the needs of your target audience, as identified in your market research.
For your value proposition to be optimally effective in a healthcare industry that’s shifting towards value-based payments - it should also highlight how your product improves patient outcomes, enhances the patient experience, and increases efficiency for healthcare providers. Market research can be helpful here to help validate and provide evidence for these claims.
It’s also worth noting that your value proposition will vary depending on whether your device is innovative or equivalent.
There’s clearly a lot to consider when you’re considering your value proposition, which is why you need to approach it methodically.
How to develop a value proposition for your medical device
If you’re going to develop a strong value proposition that communicates the benefits of your product to various different stakeholders, it’s important to take a methodological, research-driven approach to its development.
Understand your audience and the problem you solve
Before developing your value proposition, it's crucial to understand the challenges and unmet needs of your target audience segments.
A combination of both qualitative and quantitative healthcare market research methods can help identify the limitations of existing products, and where your device can add value.
Highlight positive outcomes of your device
With the shift towards value-based payments in healthcare, it's important to communicate how your device supports hospitals in reducing costs, improving the quality of care, enhancing efficiency, and achieving better patient outcomes.
Medical market research can help provide evidence and insight to support these claims.
Differentiate your device
If your medical device is innovative, it’s important to highlight the clinical benefits, efficiency improvements, or enhancements to patient experience that can help justify higher price points.
If your medical device is an equivalent product, you might switch to emphasizing cost savings and providing assurances about quality to address concerns about switching from incumbent solutions.
Integrating and evolving your value proposition
Once you’ve developed your value proposition, it’s important that it’s consistently communicated across all customer touchpoints, including your website, brochures, marketing materials, and sales approaches.
It’s also important to conduct ongoing market research and implement feedback loops with end users to help you refine your value proposition and adapt to changing market needs.
Step 5: Conducting a price sensitivity analysis
Setting the right price for your medical device is crucial for ensuring market success and profitability with your product launch.
Price sensitivity analysis helps determine the optimal pricing strategy for your device by evaluating how changes in price affect demand.
This market research helps balance market penetration with profitability, ensuring your device isn't priced too low to impact revenues or too high to impact adoption.
Because price sensitivity in the medical device market can be complex, it’s always worth partnering with someone who has the right expertise to deliver accurate, actionable insights.
At IDR Medical, we have more than 20 years of experience in helping medical device manufacturers take their products to market, including many complex pricing projects.
Basic pricing frameworks aren’t suitable for the needs of the medical industry, so we typically use a combination of the following approaches to help define your ideal pricing:
- Conjoint Analysis
This approach presents participants with different product configurations and prices to understand trade-offs and the relative importance of each product attribute. - Gabor Granger
This approach is valuable for measuring price elasticity and for identifying the price at which you can maximize revenue by asking respondents about their likelihood of purchasing at various price points. - Van Westendorp
This method reveals key price points by asking respondents about how they feel about your device at different prices. It helps establish at which point your device's quality would be questioned, the price at which they feel they’d be getting a good deal, and the price at which you’d be considered too expensive.
Step 6: Implementing usability testing
Ensuring your medical device is safe, reliable, and easy for your target audience to use is critical to your long-term success in the market.
Usability testing allows you to observe how different groups of users interact with your device in different environments, helping identify safety issues and design flaws before product launch.
The approach you take to usability testing will vary significantly for every device, but is likely to include a combination of:
- Moderated usability testing
- Unmoderated usability testing
- Remote usability testing
- A/B testing
- Eye tracking
- Surveys and questionnaires
- Heuristic evaluation
- Contextual inquiry
Having a robust and multi-faceted approach to usability testing not only helps ensure your device launches safely but also prevents you from having to make any costly post-launch modifications.
Usability testing can also highlight unique benefits that you might consider including in your value proposition and marketing communications.
Step 7: Testing communications effectiveness
Your marketing communications and sales strategy can have a significant impact on the market success of your medical device.
If you don’t get your communication strategy right, no matter how impressive your device is, you're less likely to see the adoption or commercial success you’d like.
Communications testing helps ensure your messages align with the insights you’ve gained from market research and resonate with your target audience for maximum impact.
The common steps to follow when conducting a communications test include:
1: Agreeing on KPIs and designing your test
The best place to start is by identifying the most appropriate key performance indicators (KPIs) for your communications, which can be used as the measurement metric for your tests.
This might include metrics such as post views, page visits, and email open rates.
Once you have your KPIs set, it’s recommended that you develop hypothesis-driven testing strategies that can be easily measured and evaluated—for example, how focusing on cost rather than benefits might attract more cost-conscious users.
2: Selecting the appropriate market research methodology
It’s important to choose the right research method for your objectives— with surveys and questionnaires providing access to large sample sizes cost-effectively, but focus groups providing more in-depth insights.
It’s often best to combine a number of quantitative and qualitative market research methodologies to deliver the most accurate results.
3: Executing the test and collecting data accurately
If you’re going to make decisions based on the data you collect, it's important to have complete confidence in it. Taking steps to remove bias, such as ensuring consistent interview tone, diverse survey teams, and eliminating leading questions, can help give you peace of mind that you’re making decisions about your communications strategy based on robust and valid data.
4: Analyzing and interpreting results
Once you’ve conducted your tests, it’s time to see how the data either supports or disproves your initial hypothesis.
When analyzing qualitative data, thematic analysis is often useful for helping identify recurring themes and their relationships.
For quantitative data, regression analysis, linear programming, and data mining are more commonplace for helping to gain meaningful insights from your market research.
IDR Medical: Your healthcare pricing and marketing research company
Launching a medical device in the modern healthcare market requires a strategic approach informed by market research insights at every stage of your product development lifecycle.
At IDR Medical, we specialize in healthcare market research, providing valuable support and guidance from initial concept development to post-launch assessment.
Our services help you identify target market segments, evaluate market opportunities, understand customer needs and pain points, assess brand equity, optimize market positioning, and create compelling value propositions and communication strategies.
Another area in which we have expertise is helping you set the right price for your medical device to achieve the right balance between market penetration and profitability.
Using advanced techniques like conjoint analysis, Gabor Granger, and Van Westendorp, we’re able to help you develop pricing strategies that are informed by a thorough understanding of customer requirements, current market conditions, and the competitive environment - to help you achieve success from your medical device product launch.