Market Leader Strategies: AstraZeneca Defending its Turf

Due to this dramatic fall in sales, the product life cycle (PLC) curve of the brand looks like a shark's fin.

The company was, however, not ready to let go of its cash cow so easily. It developed a team in 1995 called the Shark Fin Project team to design a defense strategy against the generic competitors that would allow it to maintain its market leadership. The team which consisted of marketers, lawyers, and scientists, including some Nobel Laureates, came out with a strategy over the next seven years that sought to outwit the patent-expiration peril. Their answer was a new drug Esomeprazole, which was a mirror image of Omeprazole.

Through its promotional efforts, the company sought to switch users of Losec/Prilosec to Nexium. In the US, the company launched one of the costliest marketing campaigns (for a drug) to achieve its objective.

Meanwhile, the company also kept competitors of the generic drug at bay by engaging them in a string of litigations. The Shark Fin Project team had made such an elaborate plan that the company was able to keep the generic versions of Prilosec out of the US market till early 2003.

This gave AstraZeneca vital time to switch Prilosec sales to Nexium...