Revolutionary marketing research for an evolutionary pharmaceutical market

What could be more foolish than carefully conducting marketing research on a ‘reminder’ detail piece for a seven-year-old product that will likely never see the light of day in physicians’ offices? How about testing a drug advertisement for the same product to determine if it is ‘credible,’ ‘unique’ and ‘persuasive’?

Let’s face it, much of the pharmaceutical marketing research conducted day-to-day is more about the way pharmaceutical marketing used to be than the way it is at the present time, let alone in the future.

Change on the horizon

We do not anticipate pharmaceutical marketing will change overnight, but rather be slowly but inexorably modified in response to a number of factors. These include a decline in the number of genuinely new molecules being approved, a decrease in demonstrable return on investment, rising numbers of “no-see” physicians, increasingly negative public relations, the projected growth in importance of developing countries in contributing to drug sales worldwide, etc.

The kicker here is that, in addition to conducting marketing research designed to support the marketing activities of today, we as pharmaceutical marketing researchers need to conduct revolutionary marketing research that will provide direction for the evolutionary changes that can be anticipated in pharmaceutical marketing over the years to come.

Although volumes could be written about what such revolutionary marketing research might look like and why, suffice it to say that two related but distinctly different research directions will need to be pursued as quickly as possible if researchers working for pharmaceutical companies and the research agencies that service them are to provide meaningful direction for the future.

Pharmaceutical Marketing 2.0

The first research direction is to determine in the developed countries (typically defined as the United States, the G5 countries and Japan), which elements of marketing work and are superfluous or perhaps even deleterious (for example, a pharmaceutical sales representative attempting to call on a physician who has already expressed a preference not to see this representative, or to see him/her only in the event that they have important new information to share or other service of value to provide). Based on such an analysis, we would likely create a “Pharmaceutical Marketing 2.0” very different than the one employed today.

Here, we must remember that each of the developed countries has it’s own approach to pharmaceutical marketing, and we should examine what these approaches have in common and where they differ. From this we might learn which activities are universally useful, locally useful or not useful at all. Rather than simply tweaking current marketing efforts, e.g., reducing the size of the sales force by 10 percent, such an analysis should permit us to start with a clean slate and only employ those components of the marketing mix that actually work, as determined through the conduct of both qualitative and quantitative marketing research. A major learning of this analysis, we believe, will be that as pharmaceutical marketing researchers we should spend far more time studying issues, such as how physicians consume information, why some patients comply with long-term therapy and others do not, etc., and far less time focused on products, their features and benefits.

Hopefully, as much of Pharmaceutical Marketing 2.0 as possible can be held constant across the developed countries of interest, but this research might well also inform us of cultural and other variables that will cause us to change our approach from country to country.

Focusing on the developing countries

Related to this last point, our second and final meta-challenge in pursuing revolutionary marketing research, we believe, is to gain a far better understanding of health care delivery as it is practiced in developing countries and pharmaceutical marketing as it should be practiced in these countries. Although much talk has been heard in recent years about pharmaceutical marketing being global, we have limited most of our marketing research, and thus most of our understanding, to the developed countries. Numerous reports, forecasts and health care futurists, on the other hand, have said that much of the growth of the pharmaceutical industry, which is predicted to double in size by 2020, will come from developing locales, e.g., the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China). While the economies of these regions are predicted to grow at rates significantly higher, by definition, than those of developed countries, it is also believed that the economics and health care delivery systems of developing countries will not support the drug pricing, and thus the funds for drug marketing, currently enjoyed in developed countries and especially the United States. As a result, we will once again need to take a clean slate to pharmaceutical marketing in such countries and to their billions of patients if we are to create a Pharmaceutical Marketing 2.0 appropriate for an entirely different set of circumstances.

Accomplishing the mission

In summary, our vision for the future of pharmaceutical marketing research consists of helping to fix what is broken in pharmaceutical marketing in developed countries, while ensuring that we get off to a good start in creating pharmaceutical marketing in developing countries. To accomplish either, let alone both, these missions it is further predicted that:

• Rather than working on an individual project basis, our efforts will be directed toward the development of a collective body of knowledge and the graphic user interfaces and other tools that will help us to conveniently update and access these knowledge bases.
• Pharmaceutical marketing research will increasingly be conducted by large multinational corporations, such as GfK, that have “feet on the street,” and thus local knowledge, in the developed and developing countries that constitute the truly global marketplace. These are companies that also have the resources to develop knowledge bases of their own to provide clients with a jumpstart into this new era of pharmaceutical marketing.
  

BIO

Richard B. Vanderveer, Ph.D., is Group Chief Executive Officer of the GfK US Healthcare Companies. A consumer and industrial psychologist, Dr. Vanderveer has spent more than 35 years in the pharmaceutical industry in a career that has earned him recognition as a thought leader and visionary in pharmaceutical marketing and marketing research and as an industry expert in the development of product positioning, promotional platforms and physician segmentation.

He created and led three highly successful pharmaceutical marketing research companies (The Vanderveer Group/TVG, Physician Micromarketing and GfK V2) before being appointed in 2005 to lead the management and strategic direction of the GfK US Healthcare Companies. Dr. Vanderveer is a regular contributor to pharmaceutical marketing publications, including serving as a monthly columnist for Medical Marketing & Media. He is also a frequent speaker at pharmaceutical marketing and marketing research conferences.

Dr. Vanderveer can be reached at 001 215 283 3200 or rvanderveer@gfkushc.com.