Medicines Company's

Medicines Company's drug, Angiomax, outperforms heparin, but requires a significantly higher price to produce. This makes the drug difficult to attractively price towards hospitals. This difficulty in pricing stems from a poor positioning strategy for Angiomax which does not maximize the perceived value that the drug provides to its key customer segments. Therefore, Medicines Co., must develop a positioning strategy that maximizes the perceived value of Angiomax to a key customer segment.

To develop a positioning strategy, Medicines Co. must first determine what critical characteristics its key customer segemsnt (doctors, hospital administrators, and hospital pharmacists) value in an anticoagulant (Appendix A). Medicine Co. should then determine where Angiomax and heparin fall based on these characteristics. This will determine areas where Angiomax should compete against heparin when positioning itself. From this, Medicines Co. should develop a positioning statement that highlights Angiomax's strengths for one of its most compatible customer segments - in this case, doctors. The positioning statement for doctors would be "Angiomax outperforms heparin in high-risk patients resulting in significantly fewer complications while performing angioplasty procedures". The focus should be on doctors because there is significant overlap between Angiomax's benefits and what doctors value highly in an anticoagulant. Additionally, by providing these doctors with materials (Appendix B) that quantifies the cost savings from reduced complications in high-risk patients, Medicines Co. further bridges the gap between the true economic value (TEV) and the perceived value that doctors have for Angiomax.

This proposed solution is the best because it focuses on what a key customer segment values in an anticoagulant. From the case, we know that doctors are key customer segments for adopting new drugs and that hospital administrators, another key segment, are difficult to reach directly, but have similar preferences for an anticoagulant (Appendix A). By focusing our positioning strategy on the value offered to doctors, we are effectively targeting doctors and raising their perceived value for Angiomax. We are assuming this perceived value will be transferred to hospital administrators who trust the opinion of their doctors when it comes to potential cost savings from reduced complications. From a pricing perspective, we have calculated

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