Excellence in Brand Revitalisation

Summary of work

BuTrans is a well-known pain management brand, but had started to slip from HCPs’ minds and sales growth had slowed. The brand needed revitalising to refresh HCPs’ understanding of when they should prescribe BuTrans. We chose to tackle two patient groups: 

Dementia
Dementia patients often can’t tell anyone they’re in pain; this sometimes leads to aggression and agitation, which are also symptoms of dementia itself. We brought GPs face to face with the reality of pain in dementia. 

Cytochrome P4502D6 (CYP2D6) metabolism
CYP2D6 is an enzyme involved in drug metabolism and can be affected by genetic or drug-related factors in some patients, causing inadequate pain relief or unacceptable side effects from codeine or tramadol.

Doctors call these patients ‘difficult to treat’ and, unaware of CYP2D6, adjust the dose of codeine or tramadol, rather than look for an alternative. 

BuTrans patches offer pain relief independent of CYP2D6 metabolism, avoiding the underlying genetic or drug-related factors. We educated HCPs about the role of the CYP2D6 metabolism to make it salient when codeine or tramadol don’t work.

Our strategy and tactics for these two patient groups made a real impact on the brand engagement, health outcomes for patients, rep motivation and most importantly, sales.

Judges comments

This is an extremely well presented and structured entry with a strong set of insights and a creative campaign that delivered measurable business results. It showed good data on impact, a good understanding of customer insight and of the use of empathy as a lever.