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When a company introduces a therapy in a new and innovative class of medications, the challenge extends beyond simply launching a product. What you are really doing is asking the healthcare community to think differently. Health care providers (HCPs), payers, and even patients need to come to terms with a novel and unfamiliar mechanism of action (MOA) and a new way of intervening in disease. Before they can decide whether your product is valuable, they need to understand whether the class itself is valid, useful, and trustworthy.
This is why class-level positioning is not optional -- it is foundational. It comes first, before brand-level work, because it helps create the psychological frame through which every later conversation will be interpreted.
When HCPs learn about a new drug, their first instinct is not to ask: “Is this brand better than others?” Instead, they ask: “What class does it belong to, and what does that mean for my patients?” Medication class sets the boundaries of what seems possible, safe, and credible. From their earliest pharmacology sessions in medical school, HCPs are trained to learn about medications through the lens of classes, e.g., SGLT2s, beta blockers, protease inhibitors, etc.
This is why first-to-class innovator companies (a more frequent occurrence in today's pharma business) need to align on the class story before they can credibly tell the brand story. Class positioning establishes the basic narrative: what the class is, how it works, and why it's relevant. Only then can the brand-level narrative refine, differentiate, and elevate the conversation.
If you try to jump ahead to brand positioning without resolving the class-level positioning and narrative, you risk confusion. You ask HCPs to make brand-level judgments when they haven’t yet decided whether the class itself is legitimate. That leap is too great.
Strategic decisions about how to frame a new class will always be made at the leadership level. But marketing research makes those decisions more grounded, more empathetic, and more customer-centered.
Research surfaces:
In other words, research gives the commercial team a mirror. It reflects back how real people -- clinicians, patients, payers -- interpret and make sense of innovation. And this perspective often looks different from the way internal stakeholders see things.
Traditional approaches to positioning often fail because they expose physicians to fully formed positioning statements that mix clinical data, emotional benefits, and aspirational claims all at once. Psychologically, this creates what I’ve called the “weakest link” problem. HCPs -- especially specialists trained to scrutinize details -- tend to seize on the one element that feels off, and in doing so dismiss the entire statement.
The result is that otherwise credible, persuasive ideas are rejected prematurely, simply because the statement was presented as an “idea salad.” HCPs rarely engage with positioning this way in real life. They learn sequentially, logically, and cautiously -- establishing acceptance in a step-by-step manner.
This is where Customer Driven Positioning offers a different, more psychologically natural path.
Customer Driven Positioning (CDP), a methodology developed by ThinkGen, is designed to mirror how HCPs actually want to learn about a new therapy. Instead of asking them to react to finished, bundled statements, CDP presents the building blocks in sequence and allows respondents to assemble, test, and refine them.
The process follows three steps:
Respondents are then invited to co-create positioning statements by selecting and optimizing elements across categories -- Premise, Proof, then the Promise. This “learning then building” process lets HCPs construct a message that feels persuasive to them, in their own words, format and structure.
The psychology is simple but powerful: people support what they help to create. And by giving them a pathway that starts with what they most feel (Premise) and want to know (Proof) before moving to more aspirational themes (Promise), you earn permission to test claims that might otherwise feel implausible.
For class-level positioning, it is critical to listen to the right voices. Experienced clinicians and key opinion leaders (KOLs) need to be at the table. These are the individuals who understand the science deeply, who have a broader sense of background and literature and conferences presentations, and who influence broader adoption patterns. They bring an elevated perspective to both the promise and the pitfalls of an entirely new class.
But we must also balance that with perspectives from practicing clinicians who will be responsible for day-to-day adoption. KOLs provide strategic vision; community clinicians reveal practical realities. And when appropriate, payer perspectives are essential, since their frameworks for value and reimbursement shape whether a class gains traction. It may also be appropriate, in certain therapeutic categories, to bring the patient and/or caregiver voice to bear in positioning a new class.
When sampling for class-level work, depth is as important as breadth. We need KOLs who can weigh in on the science, but we also need diversity:
And while qualitative workshops are indispensable for co-creation, a quantitative validation phase can confirm whether the positioning truly resonates at scale. This hybrid approach -- depth first, breadth second -- ensures confidence in the eventual strategic decision.
Consider the example of a company developing a cell therapy for a common metabolic condition. Unlike oncology, where HCPs have been primed to expect radical innovation, the idea of applying cell therapy to a widespread metabolic condition was unfamiliar -- even unsettling -- for many providers and patients.
The company began with class-level positioning research. Using the CDP framework, they first tested the premise: could a cellular approach plausibly address the root cause of this condition? KOLs wanted a clear articulation of biological logic and background; community physicians were concerned about durability, safety, and feasibility.
Next came proof: early trial data, including safety and early efficacy signals. KOLs scrutinized methodology; community physicians asked about logistics -- how would this therapy be delivered? What patient types would be eligible?
Finally, the team introduced the promise: durable disease modification, potentially freeing patients from chronic daily medications. Here, respondents were invited to co-create language. One clinician reframed the promise as “a new foundation for long-term disease control” rather than “a cure” -- a subtle but critical psychological shift that made the narrative more credible and persuasive.
Only after class positioning was resolved did the company migrate to brand-level positioning, broadening the sample and validating differentiators such as mode of administration and patient eligibility criteria. Quantitative validation confirmed the resonance of both class and brand narratives across a wider base of prescribers.
It’s worth remembering that CDP is not the end of the journey. As I’ve written before, the output of CDP is an internal positioning recommendation -- a guiding idea or vision that informs everything else. The next step is message development, where that idea is translated into a story and deployed through materials, visuals, and interactions.
In this sense, CDP protects positioning equity. It creates an anchor that keeps later communication efforts aligned, coherent, and persuasive.
Launching a first-in-class therapy should be seen as a journey with three phases, each bracketed by workshops inclusive of key stakeholder groups and external partners:
Bypassing or compressing any of these stages carries significant risks.
When companies launch an innovative new class of therapy, they are not just marketing a product -- they are reshaping the way a disease is understood and treated. That work requires humility and rigor. It requires listening before leading, testing before telling, and co-creating before claiming.
By prioritizing class-level positioning, engaging respondents through Customer Driven Positioning, and sampling carefully across KOLs, practicing HCPs, and payers (as well as, in some cases, patients), companies can create narratives that resonate. And in doing so, they can transform not only the trajectory of their own product but the adoption of an entire therapeutic class.
In the end, positioning is not simply about what we say to the market. It’s about how we help the market make sense of something new. That is both the challenge and the opportunity when you are the first to bring an entirely new class of therapy into the world.
