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| April 2007 | ||||||||
 Reality Research: Using Ethnography to Uncover What Customers Really Do With Your Products
Ethnographic research has been used for years
by consumer product companies and other
industries to gain deeper insights about
their markets and the beliefs, motivations
and behaviors that characterize their
customers. Increasingly, pharmaceutical
companies are seeking the unique insights
this form of marketing research can provide.
In brief, ethnographic research is a means by
which pharmaceutical companies can gain more
detailed and comprehensive insights about
their customers than can typically be
obtained from traditional marketing research
methods. Using a range of data collection
techniques that hinge on participant
observation, ethnographic research is useful
for those pharmaceutical marketers who want
to deepen the pursuit of their marketing
questions by exploring the often significant
gaps between what respondents say they
do, in
a formal marketing research interview
setting, and what they actually do when
observed in a more natural environment.
In a
recent Medical Marketing & Media article,
Barry J. Cerf, Ph.D., GfK V2 Executive Vice
President and a trained anthropologist,
explores the application of ethnographic
methods to pharmaceutical marketing research
and outlines a number of ideal scenarios
where product teams can benefit from the
ethnographic “edge.”
 The Future of Pharmaceutical Marketing Research: Challenges and the Pharma MR Industry Response
Over the next five to six years, the global
pharmaceutical industry will face several
immense and unprecedented challenges that
will necessitate important shifts in the
marketing research demands placed upon
supplier agencies. As a tool for reducing
business decision-making risk, marketing
research will continue to play a vital role
within the global pharmaceutical industry.
However, with massive challenges looming in
the drug business, there are key sectors
where marketing researchers need to evolve to
meet drug companies’ needs.
This article, written by Noah M. Pines,
Executive Vice President of GfK V2,
illustrates these challenges, the big picture
strategic actions that drug companies are
taking, and how the industry-MR supplier
relationships may change as a result.
The Four Colors of Marketing Research: Different Colors for Different Strategic Marketing Situations
Fact: Only 30 percent of the human brain is
organized to process verbal information while
70 percent works to process visual
information. Accordingly, in this month’s
published document for The Orange
Pages, we
employ visualization techniques to think
about pharmaceutical marketing research in
terms of colors – red, blue, white and black.
We make color designations according to the
different types of strategic situations a
product, a portfolio or even a company can
find themselves in, and we discuss the
different kinds of marketing research issues
and methodologies that should be brought
forth in each of these situations.
Red marketing research is virtually always
focused on a single competitive product – or
a competitive set of products – and evaluates
our product against the competition.
Although Blue marketing research still
supports marketing efforts against the
competition, it
does not attempt to move the product on the
scales but rather to move the
scales, by adding a new dimension or
increasing the importance of an existing one.
White marketing research is used in the
unusual circumstance when a genuinely new
product can permit a pharmaceutical marketer
to create a whole new marketplace. Finally,
Black marketing research helps us
determine
what factors have a negative impact on our
business.
Your Guide to Getting Global Research Right: GfK's Workshop at the PBIRG Conference, Sunday, May 6
We invite you to join the GfK U.S. Healthcare
Companies May 6-9 in Savannah, Georgia, at the
Pharmaceutical Business Intelligence Research
Group’s (PBIRG) Annual General Meeting. The
theme of the 2007 conference is
entirely focused on international marketing
research.
To kick off the conference, on Sunday, May 6,
at 2 p.m., two of GfK’s top leaders and
global marketing research veterans – Bart
Weiner, President of GfK V2, and Brian Hull,
President of GfK Strategic Marketing – will
present a fast-paced “boot-camp” style
workshop, Best Practices for Global Marketing
Research in the Key Markets: 120 Tips in 120
Minutes.
Participants will be engaged with an overview
of the “Top 9” countries representing the
main markets for pharmaceutical products, and
thus the countries on which most
pharmaceutical manufacturers focus their
global marketing research efforts: the United
States, Japan, Germany, France, Italy, the United
Kingdom, Spain, Mexico and Brazil.
Key takeaways from the session will include:
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 Readying Bold New Strategies for a Discontinuous Future Having just returned from the PMRG Conference in Las Vegas, I came away with one major thought on my mind. As luck would have it, that thought was instilled in the closing session, where as usual only about a third of the more than 500 conference attendees were still present. (What is with people who schlep all the way across the country and then bail out before the closing bell?) The thought came from Dr. Glenna Crooks, who is one of my favorite thinkers and speakers in pharmaceutical strategy. Having been deeply involved at the federal level with healthcare policy in several administrations, Dr. Crooks gets how things work in a way far more profound than the way the world is seen by the average pharmaceutical marketing researcher, including me. Glenna first got my attention several years ago with a brilliant presentation she made about the important “covenants” that need to exist linking all the players in healthcare, and how many of these covenants have broken down and are badly in need of repair. I confess that having heard her presentation and then reading her book on the same topic, I will never think of “pharmaceutical marketing” in the same way again. Sure we need to gain market share and make money for our stockholders, but can we really do it at the cost of breaking down our covenants with physicians and their patients? This time around, she got me with another thunderbolt. Citing and agreeing with a pronouncement by futurist Jonathan Peck, she suggested that within the next two decades or so, there would be no such thing as the protection of intellectual property – patents as we know them in the pharmaceutical business – and that the profitability of pharmaceutical companies would then be dependent upon their speed, agility and efficiency in marketing their version of a product that would be offered by numerous companies around the world. Yikes! Talk about a paradigm shift. How do we even begin to get ready for such a fundamental transition in our industry? First, I think we need to consider for a moment whether they are right in their predictions. You should think about this and draw your own conclusions, but I believe that they are indeed correct. We already see mini-versions of this world around us...  Richard B. Vanderveer, Ph.D. Group Chief Executive Officer GfK U.S. Healthcare Companies   Did You Miss the March Issue of Topline? Click here to read the issue, which includes:
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