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For most pharmaceutical brand teams, Awareness, Trial, and Usage (ATU) studies sit quietly in the background. They’re essential and foundational, but rarely exciting. They track familiar metrics, arrive on a predictable cadence, and often feel like a reporting exercise rather than a source of strategic momentum.
And yet, when an ATU is working the way it should, it becomes something very different. It becomes the instrument panel for the brand. It tells you whether awareness is translating into real consideration, whether early trial is converting to sustained usage, whether perception is shifting in your favor -- or quietly eroding.
Over the past few years at ThinkGen, we’ve spent a lot of time rethinking the role of the ATU. The result is what we call the Strategic ATU: a version of the traditional tracker designed not simply to monitor metrics, but to actively guide brand growth and brand health.
If your current ATU feels stale, it may be time for a different approach.
ThinkGen began its life as a qualitative research firm. In the early years, our reputation was built on deep qualitative work: moderating conversations with physicians, patients, and other stakeholders in ways that effectively surfaced the underlying motivations behind treatment decisions and translated insights into strategy.
Naturally, we staffed the company with people who had similar backgrounds: experienced moderators, strategists, and qualitative thinkers.
That heritage remains very much alive and still thrives here at ThinkGen. Strategic qualitative research continues to be one of our corporate strengths.
But the company has evolved significantly over the past five years.
Under the leadership of Brian Hull, ThinkGen has transformed into a truly full-service global insights agency, capable of delivering both sophisticated qualitative work and a wide range of quantitative studies. The numbers tell the story: in 2025, more than half of our revenue derived from quantitative research, and this year is tracking in the same direction.
And perhaps the clearest signal of this shift: we’ve already sold 11 ATU studies this year alone (up from 3 this time last year)!
When we ask clients why they moved their ATU trackers to us, the answers are remarkably consistent.
First, there’s the experience model.
Unlike many larger marketing research agencies, where ongoing tracking studies are often staffed by junior teams, we intentionally assign senior, experienced researchers to our ATUs. These studies may run for years. They deserve people who understand brands, markets, and commercial strategy -- not just survey programming.
Second, our ATUs are designed as strategic tools, not passive dashboards.
Traditional trackers often stop at the basics: awareness, trial, usage, maybe satisfaction. Those metrics matter, but by themselves they don’t tell the full story of how a brand is performing in the market.
Our ATUs are built around the concept of brand health.
As outlined in our framework, we monitor the entire brand health funnel: from awareness and familiarity through preference share, satisfaction, future advocacy, and the underlying market drivers that influence treatment choice. We also examine how commercial execution -- messaging, sales force interactions, support programs, and other touchpoints -- shapes those perceptions longitudinally.
The goal is not simply to observe change, but to understand why it’s happening.
A well-designed ATU should do much more than report numbers.
At ThinkGen, our ATUs are explicitly designed to:
When these elements are in place, the ATU becomes something more. It becomes a roadmap for brand leadership, offering proactive insights that help teams optimize opportunities, mitigate barriers, and guide commercial strategy.
Another way our approach differs is the integration of qualitative research alongside quantitative tracking.
Because of our roots and true full-service, multi-disciplinary team, we’re very comfortable weaving qualitative work into ATU programs (when it adds value).
Sometimes that means a short series of HCP interviews to understand a sudden shift in prescribing behavior. Other times it may involve patient conversations to explore adherence barriers or perception changes that the quantitative data has revealed.
This hybrid approach keeps the tracker from becoming mechanical. It allows the brand team to periodically look beneath the metrics and understand the human drivers behind them.
A major reason our ATU practice has taken off is the energy and strategic thinking coming from several of our business unit leaders.
Nipa Clayton, Deanna Whitlock, and Kara Olds have each brought tremendous commercial perspective, creativity and vibrancy to how these studies are designed and delivered. They’ve pushed us to think differently about how ATUs can support brand teams -- not just as research deliverables, but as strategic decision tools.
Clients notice the difference.
One brand team that moved a global ATU for a top-10 brand to ThinkGen after working with a large consulting firm for years had a simple way of describing the change.
They started calling our version “the good ATU.”
I’ll admit -- that’s a phrase we’ve grown rather fond of.
ATUs will never be the flashiest study in the research portfolio.
They don’t carry the excitement of a launch readiness positioning or brand narrative study, or the novelty of a new segmentation analysis. But they are foundational. Without them, brand teams are often navigating without a clear view of the metrics that truly matter.
When done well, an ATU becomes the steady heartbeat of the brand’s insight system.
When done poorly -- or when it grows stale -- it becomes background noise. Worse, the commercial team might start to question whether or not to continue funding it.
If your brand team is currently running an ATU that feels routine, predictable, or simply uninspiring, it may be worth rethinking what that study could be.
We believe ATUs can, and should, play a much more strategic role.
If that idea resonates with you, I’d welcome the opportunity to show you what a Strategic ATU looks like in practice.
Sometimes the most important research studies aren’t the ones that generate the most buzz. They’re the ones that quietly help brands make better decisions, month after month, year after year.
And those are exactly the kinds of studies we love to run.
