A pharmaceutical brand team’s priorities change throughout the lifecycle of the product they support. Before launch, their challenge may be helping people recognize an unmet health need. At launch, it becomes explaining a new treatment option. And as the therapy grows in popularity, attention shifts toward appropriate initiation, sustained use and the barriers that stand between a prescription and a patient taking therapy.
Point of Care (POC) media can support each of these objectives.
As we explored in Top Point of Care Marketing Strategies for Your 2026 Media Plans, POC can contribute to meaningful brand outcomes across awareness, consideration, conversion and retention. Its role extends through physician offices, EHRs, pharmacies and the digital touchpoints surrounding care.
Below, we explain how POC media can help support progression through five key brand stages: pre-launch, launch, growth, maturity and loss of exclusivity (LOE).
1. Pre-Launch: Build Disease Awareness and Prepare for the Conversation
Before a therapy reaches the market, patients may need help understanding symptoms, recognizing changes in their health or preparing to discuss a concern. Healthcare professionals (HCPs) may also need accessible disease education that supports recognition and referral.
For marketers, the first question to ask during this pre-launch phase should be: What information gap could prevent an appropriate patient from entering the care pathway?
Then the opportunity rests in building messaging and campaigns to address those gaps, and selecting the right settings in which to do so.
Here’s an example of how POC could help: An unbranded POC campaign could address an information gap through symptom education in a primary care waiting room, a pre-visit discussion guide or materials that explain what to expect during a diagnostic evaluation. The call to action should be concrete: describe a symptom, ask a question or discuss whether further evaluation is appropriate.
POCMA’s Phreesia and Sesame Workshop case study offers a useful example of unbranded education. The pediatric campaign used familiar characters and relevant health content to engage caregivers during digital check-in. Although it was not a pharmaceutical pre-launch campaign, it illustrates how POC can make education approachable before the clinical conversation begins.
2. Launch: Turn Awareness Into Informed Consideration
Once a treatment is approved and available, the educational task becomes more specific. Patients need to understand that an option exists and what to ask about it. And HCPs need information that helps them assess its appropriate use.
POC media can help connect those two needs within the same care experience.
Consider a launch in a category where patients are familiar with existing treatment approaches. Broad-reach advertising may introduce the new brand, but a patient arriving for an appointment may still be unsure whether it is relevant to them as a result. An exam-room resource can help frame that question, while HCP-facing content can provide approved indication, efficacy, safety and administration information.
Of note, each asset should have a manageable purpose. A patient discussion aid might organize questions about benefits, risks and practical treatment requirements. A clinician resource might make the relevant prescribing information easier to find. Consistency matters, but the two audiences do not need identical creative.
Our Orgovyx case study with CMI Media Group shows the value of connecting patient and provider education. The campaign addressed a gap between patient preferences and familiar prescribing routines, prompting patients to discuss an oral treatment option while also educating HCPs. The case study reported an approximately 70% increase in new-to-brand prescriptions.
For a launch campaign, consider measuring awareness among the relevant audience, treatment discussions and new-to-brand prescriptions where the study design supports attribution.
3. Growth: Help Appropriate Patients Move From Decision to Treatment
As a brand grows in popularity, the next marketing opportunity may lie in what happens after consideration - because a patient and provider can agree on a treatment without the patient successfully beginning it.
Effective use of POC media in this growth stage should consider the steps between prescribing and initiation. Where do patients get stuck? Which questions reach the practice after the visit? Which access resources are difficult to locate? These questions can reveal a more useful growth brief than simply increasing message frequency.
POCMA’s Plan From the Moment of Care Back encourages marketers to identify the decision or care transition first, then map the people and information required to support it. Applied here, that means giving the handoff from prescription to treatment its own audience, content and measurement plan.
Depending on the treatment pathway and media partner capabilities, a campaign could connect in-workflow access information for the care team with pharmacy education and post-visit instructions for patients. Content might explain how to contact a support program, where to check eligibility requirements or whom to call when the next step is unclear.
When measuring the success of a growth-focused POC media investment, choose measures that reflect the handoff: first fills, time to initiation or prescription abandonment, where suitable data are available.
4. Maturity: Reinforce Understanding and Support Continued Care
An established brand may be familiar to clinicians while remaining unfamiliar to the patient who received a recent diagnosis. Other patients may have used the therapy for months but developed new questions about administration, cost or their care plan.
For mature brands, the POC opportunity includes helping patients maintain that understanding over time.
In 8 Things Healthcare Professionals Want Pharmaceutical Marketers to Know in 2026, clinicians emphasized the importance of repeated education and identified affordability and ease of use as barriers to following treatment plans. They also described the contributions of pharmacists and other care-team members beyond the prescribing physician.
Translate those insights into a more focused brief. A follow-up resource could invite patients to raise difficulties with their care team. Pharmacy materials could make current assistance information easier to locate. Take-home education could reinforce approved instructions in language patients and caregivers can use later.
Revisit the creative even when the core positioning remains stable. Why? Questions arising after six months of treatment may differ from questions at the first prescription. Refreshing content around those needs can be more useful than repeating the launch message indefinitely.
Your approach to measurement should also evolve at this stage. Refill behavior, adherence and persistence may be relevant, depending on the therapy and available data.
Maturity is also a good time to reassess your overall media investment and its efficacy. Retain placements that address a meaningful need, investigate underperformance and test whether an updated audience or different message produces better results.
5. Loss of Exclusivity: Protect Education Where It Still Creates Value
Approaching LOE changes the commercial equation. In its analysis of challenges for established brands, IQVIA describes how budgets and personnel can shift toward newer products, requiring established brands to adapt their promotional models.
But LOE is not a uniform event. IQVIA’s research on changing LOE dynamics shows why product type, competition, access and delivery channels still matter at this stage. Generic and biosimilar competition can create different erosion patterns, and maintaining prescription volume does not necessarily preserve net revenue.
For POC planning, the implication for marketers is to reassess investment against the brand’s remaining opportunity and the information patients and providers still need.
That may include current access information, practical support for people continuing therapy or clear direction to the care team when treatment or coverage changes. Communications should help people navigate the available options accurately, without implying that an appropriate generic or biosimilar is inferior.
And if and when budgets tighten, ask: Which education close to a care decision would leave a meaningful gap if we removed it?
We recommend evaluating that question through three tests:
- Need: Does the placement address an identifiable question or barrier for a relevant audience?
- Contribution: Is there credible evidence of incremental impact, or a defined test that can establish it?
- Economics: Does the expected contribution justify the investment under current access, pricing and competitive conditions?
Protecting education does not require maintaining every placement. A smaller, targeted program may be appropriate; some tactics may no longer warrant investment. The objective is a deliberate transition: adjust commercial spending toward newer-to-market brands within the portfolio while preserving useful information where it remains justified for mature brands.
Match the Budget to the Job - and the Measurement to the Outcome
Across the lifecycle, POC can earn its place through a clear objective and an appropriate evaluation plan.
Our guidance on measuring POC marketing’s true impact recommends aligning brand objectives, campaign goals and measurement methods before activation. It also explains why simplistic measures of whether an office has POC media can miss differences in the patient audiences actually reached.
Agree on the outcome, observation period and comparison approach early. Where feasible, use well-designed test-versus-control studies to assess incrementality, and account for changes in access, competitive activity and other media. Be particularly careful around launch and LOE, when market conditions can change quickly. A prescription trend alone cannot isolate a campaign’s contribution, for example.
As we argued in POC As Foundational Spend, bringing POC into strategy development gives teams the opportunity to define its role before budgets are committed.
For your next plan, identify the brand’s lifecycle stage, the patient’s next decision and the barrier education can realistically address. Then use POCMA’s Product Finder to explore partners and tactics suited to that job. The brand’s priorities will change, but the discipline of connecting useful information to a meaningful care moment should remain.