December 2006

Delivering New Insights for Product Managers
by Mapping the Patient Experience
Product managers looking for insights to support important decisions in product development and marketing planning are increasingly turning to a unique pharmaceutical marketing research methodology, called patient experience or treatment mapping, as a key source of fact-based background information. Using this mapping methodology, product managers can gain key insights into the market to provide the context and depth of knowledge that is needed to proceed with nearly any type of marketing research initiative.

Lauded for its long-term value as a research exercise that serves to lay the foundation of information for a variety of future marketing research phases, mapping the patient experience also provides immediate practical value as an intensive boot camp of sorts for those product team members who don’ t have years of category experience, as it provides a deep understanding of the market through the eyes of the physician.

In an article featured in the November issue of Product Management Today, GfK V2 Executive Vice President John Taenzler, Ph.D., explores this methodology, which is attracting attention as a key tool in the pharmaceutical marketing research arsenal.

Adverse Event Reporting: Manipulating
Marketing Research to Manage Risk
In our third published document on the topic of Adverse Event Reporting (AER), we explore an issue that was touched on only briefly in our first AER discussion back in October. That is, the measures some pharmaceutical companies are taking to manipulate marketing research efforts in order to prevent respondents from producing information that would constitute a reportable Adverse Event (AE), and therefore, reduce a company's own risk. For example, from conversations we have had with clients and our researchers who are out in the field, we have learned that several pharmaceutical companies have assembled questionnaire review committees to ensure that questions likely to produce the report of AEs are purged from questionnaires before they are fielded. Other companies are strategically selecting or avoiding certain research methodologies based on their likelihood of producing a reportable AE.

Clearly, these circumstances show that we are moving away from an era in which meeting a project’ s marketing research objectives was the major driver of methodology selection toward an era in which minimizing the risk of hearing an AE reported weighs greatly in selecting the methodology. This movement not only substantially reduces the value of the data collected through marketing research projects, but also actually diminishes the ability of marketing research to contribute to the safety vigilance process. While we would certainly never suggest that a pharmaceutical company go looking for trouble, we do strongly recommend against using any other criteria except methodological appropriateness as a factor in selecting the approach(es) to be taken in a particular research project.

Beyond Product Positioning:
Creating Your Product's Story
While the pharmaceutical industry has spent the past several years optimizing its ability to reach and target physicians through an expanded sales force and a diverse array of new communication channels, it is becoming evident that companies must now increasingly adopt more innovative approaches to positioning and message development. This is primarily because the proliferation of the industry’ s marketing communications capacity has produced an unfortunate consequence: physician attention-deficit disorder. Ironically, this side effect is the direct result of the overabundance of pharmaceutical promotions aimed at medical providers. Together with a number of other factors, this promotional noise has caused physician time available to attend to, filter and assimilate information to become increasingly scarce.

Thus, while it is now easier to reach and target physicians, it has never been more challenging to truly access them – to command their attention and to deliver effective, memorable, prescription-driving messages. Drawing on thoughts expressed in a seminal book by Ken Sacharin, Attention!, the central challenge that pharmaceutical marketers will increasingly face is to communicate effectively with physicians without simultaneously adding to the deluge of messages that are causing doctors to filter out – or completely ignore – the promotion.

This quandary will force companies to adopt a new set of message development practices that are based on the new realities of this hypercommunicated, hypercompetitive medical marketplace.

Did You Miss the November Issue of Topline?

Click here to read the issue, which includes commentary about implementing the "Agency of Record" model for marketing research, a guest editorial by health economist and forecaster Jane Sarasohn-Kahn on the "Wal-Martization of Healthcare" and more.

Pharmaceutical
Marketing Old
Wives’ Tales

As I have sat back over the course of the last month and examined the trends I am seeing in the pharmaceutical industry, I have been impressed by the extent to which, as described in Malcolm Gladwell’ s seminal book, The Tipping Point, important initiatives start in the minds and hands of a few people and grow to the “tipping point” at which juncture they become general practice.

Interestingly, by this point many key players have forgotten where the initiative started, what it was designed to accomplish, etc. Therefore, they are left to go through motions consistent with the initiative, without understanding how their actions could be improved upon, when the initiative has become irrelevant or changed to a point where it requires different action.

For example, at some point in unrecorded history, the assumption was made that a Pharmaceutical Sales Representative (PSR) spending more time with a physician was better than her or him spending less time. Seems like it makes sense. And as a result, all sorts of machinations, including serving food to the physicians, using computers instead of paper visual aids to deliver the detail presentation and mirrored sales forces, i.e., more than one PSR calling on the same physician to represent a product, have been developed in an effort to lengthen the selling time with physicians. The only problem is that in 2006...


Richard B. Vanderveer, Ph.D.
Group Chief Executive Officer
GfK U.S. Healthcare Companies



Recommended Resource: New Rules and Random Rants about Qualitative Research
Just as Bill Maher offers “new rules” at end of his show, which are random rants about what is wrong with the world, GfK V2 Senior Consultant Bernard Schwartz offers his own “new rules” on the topic of qualitative research in a recently published QRCA Views article.

While Mr. Schwartz developed his “new rules” from his experiences and perspectives as a supplier-side researcher and consultant, he also provides important take-aways for those on the other side of the mirror, i.e., clients, on how they can better understand and form positive working relationships with their supplier-side colleagues.