Co-promotion deals increase a product's share of voice in a market and are often favored by the US market. Sometimes a smaller pharmaceutical company will join forces with a medium-sized competitor so that together they can adequately cover the large and increasingly competitive US market.

According to McNamara, companies should rethink their preference for co-promotion alliances, or at least find better ways to manage them. "Some companies, including Novartis, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Eli Lilly, have created alliance management teams to track and facilitate a partnership's success. However, our research found that alliance management of co-commercialization partnerships remains a relatively unknown and unpopular concept within the industry. People involved in the deal negotiations are opposed to the idea of handing over partnership control to a team of personnel not originally involved in the intense negotiation process."

Perhaps these teams merely complicate matters. Do they have enough history and knowledge of the actual product? Do they understand the conveyed meaning in the actual words of the agreement? Spokespeople at Eli Lilly's Office of Alliance Management (OAM) admitted in 2001 that, "Whether the investment in OAM actually creates a positive return on investment is not clear. Statistics are hard to come by" (In Vivo, Windhover, 2001).

IdeaPharma's Rea argues that differences must be resolved during initial negotiations, and he says the brand must always come first. "If the brand comes first, and petty politics comes last, co-promotion could be massively effective. Brand strategy and brand leadership should be the overriding concern; the rest should be accounting."

But the finances too often come first, he suggests. "Typically, the accountants steam in and upset everyone from the start by being very 'dog in the manger' about everything. Pre-nuptial agreements say something about a marriage, and many pharma marriages are upset by this very negotiation before anyone realizes what they were there for in the first place."

"The co-promotion team should really be no different than any other marketing team in prioritizing the brand over the tactics used to build it," Rea continues. "As long as the brand strategy comes first, followed by proper brand leadership, it shouldn't matter who sells it and how. After all, it doesn't bother Coke how many different companies sell its products."    

[11-Apr-2005]