While in the UK last week, several people asked me what we do here at Icarus Consultants.  Rather than say that we are a marketing strategy company, I simply said we were in the business of 'actionable insights'.  That got their attention and an interesting conversation ensued about what it involved.  Now, normally on this blog we tend to talk about interesting ideas and disease concepts or conference updates, but I thought it was worth explaining a little more about what we do for once.

You can group the concept of actionable insights into 5 main areas:

1) Landscape opportunity assessments – around diseases, types of therapeutics etc
2) Competitive intelligence – KIQ's, tracking, conference coverage
3) Social Media monitoring – stakeholder analysis, buzz metrics, sentiments
4) Market surveillance – competitor and market monitoring of competitors in development
5) Market entry strategies – for companies looking to enter the North American market

The goal is to gather, process and analyse huge amounts of information that enables a brand team to develop new insights and make appropriate strategic or tactical changes for their brand.

The neat thing about this rigorous process is that it:

a) Is highly flexible because you can mix 'n match in a modular fashion to achieve your brand or company goals
b) May involve primary or secondary data collection
c) Can include patients, HCP, KOL or market opinions and research on sentiments about a topic, a brand or a disease, for example.
d) Can be adapted by different clients eg senior management, market research, competitive intelligence, marketing, strategic planning, PR or social media people.

What can it be used for?

i) New products in development
ii) Marketed or mature products
iii) Partnership deals (new market entry)
iv) Licensing evaluations
v) Corporate/brand reputation

How do we gather data?

1) Primary research – interview based
2) Secondary research – we have a huge proprietary database of clinical, scientific and market information we can search
3) Web 2.0 tools – rich variety available for datamining
4) Social media monitoring – using proprietary webcrawlers and custom databases
5) Conference coverage – a great way to keep up to date with the latest clinical and scientific information

In short, we tend to work with senior management, project teams or different department with focused customer goals to find real insights to enable brand strategies to be driven.  Once client see the possibilities, they love the flexibility of the approach, the quality of the strategic reports and come back for more or refer us to their friends.  That's a rather nice endorsement and certainly keeps us very busy! 

A typical question we get is "we'd like to gather some information on X, but we're stuck and wondered if you could help us?"  If you're one of those people stuck in analysis by paralysis and need help, pick up the phone and give us a call (201 204 9210).  We're here to help and if we can't, we can usually suggest someone who can.