Tremendous-powered product launch catapults medical aesthetics company to #3 market share, saves $1 million

In 2019, a medical aesthetics company was ready to launch a brand new product in a competitive segment. The incumbent product offering commanded 70% market share and significant brand recognition, and a new offering hadn’t been introduced to the market in a decade. The company's marketing team needed a creative launch strategy to win over physicians and patients alike.

With this in mind, the company developed a first-of-its-kind cash incentive for patients, partnering with Tremendous to distribute over $20 million to 180,000 patients across the country in just eight months.

Challenge

The company faced an uphill battle in launching its new product.

• Traditionally, aesthetics companies use purchase-based promotions (e.g. buy three treatments and get 50% off the 4th treatment) or loyalty programs to generate sales.

• As a new player in the market, the company hadn’t yet built the brand awareness or customer loyalty needed to execute such promotions effectively.

• The company needed a strategy to convince both healthcare providers to stock its product and consumers to choose its product over offerings from established competitors.

Solution

The company took a two-pronged approach by:

1. Marketing its product to clinicians by pricing it less than the competing product.

2. Appealing to patients with a digital $75 Visa prepaid card incentive.  

The team wanted to send incentives directly to patients — and they wanted to use the company's mobile app to brand, track, and deliver them.

Pharmaceutical marketing agencies quoted roughly $1 million to run and administer the campaign. Balking at the cost and faced with a tight timeline, the company turned to Tremendous.

Tremendous partnered with the medical aesthetics company to build a custom solution within weeks. Using the Tremendous API, Visa prepaid cards would be seamlessly delivered in the company's mobile app.

• The company marketed this promotion directly to consumers, primarily through social media.

• Patients booked and managed their appointment in the company's app.

• Upon checking into the clinic, the Tremendous API generated a $75 Visa digital gift card.

• Patients could instantly redeem the gift card and use it towards the procedure itself, or keep it to use elsewhere.

And instead of paying $1 million in unnecessary agency costs, Tremendous enabled the company to buy the Visa cards at face value.

“We landed with Tremendous because of their technical flexibility, robust API, and willingness of their leadership team to understand and customize their software to our unique use case,” said the company's director of product management.

Results

Captured #3 market share position 6 months post-launch

The marketing campaign was immediately successful.

• Thousands of physician offices signed up and purchased the company's new product.

• Within six months of the launch, the product catapulted to the #3 market share position.

• In total, Tremendous processed more than 180,000 Visa cards for the company's patients across the United States over the course of the eight-month campaign.

“We expect [our product] to be one of the top five aesthetic product launches on a revenue basis,” said the company's President and CEO in an investor update.

Deeper insight into procedure usage and clinic sales

Pharmaceutical manufacturers traditionally have low visibility into product usage. They can track product sales to clinics, but they don’t always know how often the product was actually used.

With Tremendous, the company gained deeper insight into post-sale activities.

• Incentives were delivered once patients checked into the clinic, so the number of Visa cards sent provided a proxy for the number of procedures completed.

• The company was able to analyze this data and send sales reps to physicians interested in administering the product.

That led to other benefits at the clinic level, including:

• Higher total sales

• Larger bulk purchases

• Reduced trial periods for the company's new product