Mylan Laboratories: Innovating its relationship with the pharmacy channel

For Mylan, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of generic medications, is relationshipswith retailers such as Wal Mart, Walgreens and CVS are incredibly important. A critical inflection point in these relationships is when blockbuster drugs go generic, as meeting supply can be challenging — testing their tolerance and loyalty. In what ways could they build stronger bonds with pharmacists to help mitigate their risk at these crossroads? The task was to find out.

Incorporating a design thinking process, eight potential avenues for delivering added value were developed and probed in an extensive quantitative study. With analysis, the outcome of this produced a set of strategies that included forging a stronger connection between retail buyers and the pharmacists who work with them, and the creation of tools to aid in staying abreast of a rapidly changing landscape. One of these, the Generic Brand Reference (GBR) blue book, is now in its 13th year of print and digital production

CREDITS: Agency: Source Marketing. Rich Feldman: Design thinking exploratory, research strategy and design, analysis and recommendation.