October 2006
            
Adverse Event Reporting: The Most Significant Issue in Pharmaceutical Marketing Research Today
You have probably heard the buzz around Adverse Event Reporting (AER) growing from a whisper to a dull roar at this point in the halls of your company. From what we have seen, through many in-depth meetings with our clients on this issue, it is being considered with the utmost care and seriousness.

We believe AER is one of the most important issues that pharmaceutical marketing research has faced in decades. If not handled with great care, it could seriously impact the very foundation of our work. Pharmaceutical manufacturers have committed to enhancing their own systems for AER, and so in turn, the GfK U.S. Healthcare Companies are committed to assisting our pharmaceutical client partners in meeting their legal and ethical obligations. We are resolved to do what is necessary to support this initiative, including working with our clients’ own policies and procedures as well as developing our own internal policy and training program to ensure that a thorough and consistent foundation of education is in place with our 275 employees.

We made this same statement of support to clients in a letter distributed in August and were gratified by the positive reaction it drew from a number of clients, who subsequently invited us to have in-depth conversations with them (and often their own internal AER working groups) on this issue. There is much learning to be shared on this complex topic, which continues to evolve on an almost daily basis. As we are aware that many of you are as eager for information on this significant issue as we are, we would like to share with you our general observations to-date through a document which also concludes with our own policy on AER. As the issues that surround AER begin to gel and reach further clarity, we will share up-to-the-minute updates with you each month through this newsletter.

Measuring Sales Force Effectiveness: A Guidebook for the Pharmaceutical Industry
There is no doubt that the measurement of Sales Force Effectiveness (SFE) is becoming increasingly important. Evaluating SFE not only provides invaluable insights about the quality of your company’ s sales force and its ability to deliver the right messages, but also the capability to monitor your competitors’ sales activities.

Considering the great deal of time and expense that goes into today’ s SFE efforts, it’ s more important than ever that those responsible for evaluating SFE take a step back and think about how and what exactly is being measured. Richard B. Vanderveer, Ph.D., Group CEO of the GfK U.S. Healthcare Companies and Maureen McLaughlin, Chief Marketing Officer of GfK Market Measures perform this exact exercise and tackle other issues surrounding SFE in a new booklet entitled, Measuring Sales Force Effectiveness: A Guidebook for the Pharmaceutical Industry.

Muddled by Multivariate Methods? We Give You the Building Blocks for a Better Understanding
Do the terms "Multidimensional Scaling," "Factor Analysis" and "Linear Regression" make your head spin? You are not alone. Many marketing researchers in our industry who most typically work in qualitative methods, but are looking to learn the "basics" of quantitative approaches, are hungry for a digestible form of this information which can otherwise appear somewhat daunting.

To respond to this need, PBIRG (The Pharmaceutical Business Intelligence & Research Group) invited GfK V2 to present its expert quantitative capabilities at PBIRG's Annual Conference in the form of an educational "primer session" to introduce participants to basic multivariate methods used in pharmaceutical marketing research, in a straightforward, non-technical style. We were gratified by the positive response from the participants and in fact, due to these "rave reviews" we were asked to repeat the material at PBIRG's Fall Education Session. Similarly, we've been invited by several clients to present the topic for their departments.

Given this level of interest, we thought that many of you may also find the material of value. Thus, we present to you two resources. The first is an article authored by Bart Weiner, President, and Paul Teta, Ph.D., Executive Vice President of GfK V2 for PBIRG Perspectives, which gives an excellent written overview of the content. Paired with the second resource, the presentation slides, you should have all you need to get up to speed!

Meet Our New Additions: Senior Leadership



As a "destination employer" for the industry, the GfK U.S. Healthcare Companies continue to draw top marketing research talent. While our new researchers offer our clients a variety of methodological and therapeutic expertise, they share the common background of being marketing research veterans with experience specifically focused in the pharmaceutical industry.

    

As the Group CEO of the GfK U.S. Healthcare Companies (GfK Market Measures, GfK Strategic Marketing and GfK V2), I have the unique opportunity of working through and with our 275 employees and most of the largest, and many of the smallest, pharmaceutical companies in the world to see some "stuff."

Some things I see are important emerging trends in a marketplace where I have practiced for more than 35 years. Some are just tidbits of trivia that I notice when I am out in the marketplace. Now, through this monthly column in an informal and blog-like manner, I’ m going to share some of these observations with you.

Some of these observations you might find interesting. Read them! Some you might find boring. Skip them. Some you might disagree with. Let me know by e-mail. Rest assure that I will try to make these observations as pithy as possible, but that I will not be sharing any pharmaceutical company proprietary information along the way. So here goes!

Several noteworthy changes have occurred regarding the marketing research being conducted by the pharmaceutical industry in 2006 as compared to previous years.

First and foremost, marketing research is increasingly focused on issues, rather than just on products and their promotion. That is, clients are increasingly calling on pharmaceutical marketing research organizations, such as ours, to study such issues as...

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



Recommended Resources:
How, When &
Why Physicians Consume Information
Like most of us, physicians cannot – and do not – pay attention to every piece of information they receive.

In this article featured in Pharmaceutical Executive, Richard B. Vanderveer, Ph.D., Group CEO of the GfK U.S. Healthcare Companies, examines how physicians consume and utilize information in particular situations, and in turn, how pharmaceutical companies can make the information they provide more valuable for doctors.

Based on our qualitative and ethnographic research, which included conducting thousands of physician interviews and hundreds of hours spent observing their behavior, it was found that physicians think about two major types of information: point-of-care and clinical updates.