Med Ad News 2022 Marketer on the Rise: Allison Garrity

Med Ad News 2022 Marketer on the Rise

Allison Garrity

Senior Director, Farxiga Marketing, PCP and Endocrinology, AstraZeneca

— Nomination submitted by Triple Threat Communications

 

When you have a brand with as much promise as FARXIGA, you need someone at the helm with the drive and vision to help it reach its full potential. And that person is senior director of marketing for Farxiga, Allison Garrity.

When Garrity joined the Farxiga team, the established AstraZeneca brand already had a strong legacy in type 2 diabetes (T2D), but momentum had stalled, teams needed to be rebuilt, and – the biggest challenge of all – Farxiga had to revolutionize care again, this time with indications in heart failure (HF) and chronic kidney disease (CKD).

Developing and executing against an ambitious new brand strategy, rebuilding a brand team, and reinvigorating more than 2,000 sales representatives is challenging enough; however, due to the pandemic, all this had to be accomplished in a fully virtual/remote environment.

Spoiler alert: the new-indication launch was a huge success, with Farxiga outperforming all target goals and achieving impressive milestones in 2021 – but let’s get into how.

The heart of Garrity’s marketing challenge in 2021: how to effectively promote all the brand’s indications – including its latest indications – across four different HCP specialties (cardiologists, nephrologists, endocrinologists, and PCPs). Her answer was to support a targeted approach: engage each audience with tailored messaging under a unified Farxiga campaign to build brand equity.

Bringing together so many moving parts required leadership and intense coordination. Garrity was able to make the brand vision a reality by cultivating a collaborative relationship with her agency of record, Triple Threat Communications. This enabled the agency to go far beyond the usual client/agency relationship. With a foundation built on trust and respect, brand and agency team members were able to constructively challenge and learn from each other. Triple Threat became an integrated extension of the brand team, allowing promotional materials that fully supported brand strategy to be developed efficiently.

Garrity’s passion and leadership extends beyond the marketing specialists she works with every day. Her positive impact is felt by brand stakeholders and the extended sales force alike, leading to a highly dedicated group of people coming together to genuinely put patients at the heart of everything they do.

Farxiga exceeded its corporate KPIs and targets – including more than 40 percent growth and more than 5 million prescriptions. Most importantly, her work on the brand has helped transform of the lives of the millions of patients with T2D, HF, and/or CKD who now benefit from Farxiga – enabling them to live life to the fullest.