Acorda Therapeutics, trying to recover from its disastrous launch of Inbrija, wants Parkinson’s disease patients to know that it sees them and their fights with the condition. The fighting talk is the focus of a new website and campaign designed to help recover from the hammer blows dealt to the Inbrija launch.
New York-based Acorda forecast peak sales of $800 million or more for Inbrija when it won approval for the drug late in 2018, but the product has disappointed commercially. Global revenues hit $30.9 million last year. Acorda aims to increase that figure to between $118.5 million and $131 million in 2027 and has identified a new marketing strategy as one of the tools that can help it hit that target.
The tagline for the new campaign is “For the Fighters.” The tagline features just below the message “fight returning Parkinson's symptoms now” on the new website and next to a photo of a woman wearing a swimming cap with the text “so sluggish but I’ll fight it, I won’t let it stop me.” Feedback from Parkinson’s patients informed the message, which Acorda said “honors the fighting spirit” of the community.
“Our message to our Parkinson’s community is ‘we see you, and we see fighters.’ We want this campaign to reflect the strength, the determination and grit that people with Parkinson’s bring to their fight against this disease,” Kerry Clem, chief commercial officer at Acorda, said in a statement.
Acorda previously pitched Inbrija with the message “when Parkinson's symptoms return, get back to your moments with orally inhaled levodopa.” While Acorda has dropped that message, it has retained the focus on the fact that Inbrija can start to work in as few as 10 minutes on the new website.
The launch of the new website follows the initiation of an Inbrija TV spot in April. Acorda ran the ad on 50 streaming services, “accompanied by a digital ‘surround sound’ campaign to encourage viewers to take an action.” In a statement published in May, Acorda CEO Ron Cohen, M.D., said the ad was viewed 2.5 million times in the first six weeks and was driving “substantial traffic” to the Inbrija website.
Sales of Inbrija jumped by more than 50% in the first quarter, although, coming off a low base, they still only totaled $6.1 million. Acorda needs to increase revenues over the rest of 2023 to hit its full-year U.S. sales target of $38 million to $42 million.