June 2007
	Thoughts on Receiving the PBIRG “Lifetime Achievement Award” As many of you already know, because in many cases you were there, I was honored to receive the Mary Clement Lifetime Achievement Award at the Pharmaceutical Business Intelligence and Research Group (PBIRG) annual conference last month. Such a moment gets one thinking, and upon receiving the award I shared a few of my musings with the audience. More specifically, I thanked the members of PBIRG who nominated and selected me for this honor. There are a lot of people dedicating a lot of time to excellence in pharmaceutical marketing research right now, and I was indeed honored to be selected from among this group. Especially gratifying were some of quotations from those who nominated me, which described me as someone who has been consistently ahead of the times. With the elegance of 20/20 hindsight, this has probably been a pretty risky place to be, but apparently at least my colleagues believe that I was right more often than I was wrong when I went out on a limb. I, on the other hand, believe that the best way to predict the future is to cause it, and I’ve consistently worked through articles and presentations to try to change the pharmaceutical industry-customer interface for the good, not just to measure it. I also thanked the clients, past, present and future, who were willing to back my new ideas, often putting great pieces of their business at risk to do so. Most notable in this regard were the early clients for my early micromarketing ideas, Joe Smith, who was president of Parke Davis at the time, and Richard Fordyce of Ortho Pharmaceuticals, who in the early ‘90s saw my micromarketing vision as a way to increase customer satisfaction and corporate profitability at the same time. My associates also received my thanks. While I have set the vision and direction for GfK V2 and now for the GfK U.S. Healthcare Companies, it is the hundreds of associates with whom I have had the opportunity to work over the years, and the 275 associates currently working with me in the three GfK U.S. Healthcare Companies who have turned my wild ideas into practical services with the breadth of their core competencies, the intensity of their work and their fierce desire to please clients. The second set of comments that I made dealt with the fact that lifetime achievement awards should not mean that it is all over, but rather that it can now all begin. In my younger years, I must confess, I would do just about anything a client wanted me to do and say just about anything they wanted me to say, or often not say, in order to secure a piece of business. I needed to keep the lights on at the office and pay the mortgage on the house, which I had pledged as security for the business. Now there are no mortgages, there is a reputation I have built up over the years and now an opportunity to focus on issues that matter, rather than simply grinding out detail aid test depth interviews. How pharmaceutical companies should relate to doctors, how we can get patients to demonstrate better persistence, how we can better use interactive media in pharmaceutical marketing and marketing research and how we should deal with regulatory and business issues such as Preferred Provider Agreements and the requirement to report Adverse Events are all things on which I can now focus my time and speak out freely. Believe me when I tell you I intend to take full advantage of this newfound freedom, while continuing to provide business guidance as Group CEO of the GfK U.S. Healthcare Companies. Finally, I issued a challenge to the PBIRG audience to recognize and rise to the challenge of being a pharmaceutical marketing researcher over the next five years. I pointed out that while excellence in pharmaceutical marketing research has historically been defined in terms of new (and seemingly always more complex) marketing research techniques for use in product testing, mentoring of new researchers, etc., the next five years will gauge our excellence in terms of our ability to contribute to the reinvention of a pharmaceutical industry that is in rather dire straits. While formerly we researched products and disease states, and certainly will continue to do so, I believe we now must turn our attention to helping the industry develop a more effective, efficient way of communicating with our key stakeholders, and turn our not inconsequential resources toward assisting them as their tasks become more complex, rather than simply bombarding them with promotional messages. In order to accomplish this, we will need to identify their issues, wants, needs and motivations much more thoroughly than we are in touch with them now, and will likely develop significantly new and different methodologies to meet this challenge. In summary, I told my PBIRG colleagues, and will tell you as well, that I look forward to the years to come in pharmaceutical marketing research, as I believe that it is in these years, even more so than in years past, that our profession will make its greatest contribution to physicians and their patients, to the pharmaceutical industry and to healthcare. Richard B. Vanderveer, Ph.D. Group Chief Executive Officer GfK U.S. Healthcare Companies