March 2007
	Looking Back and Moving Forward: Rigging Pharmaceutical Marketing Research for the Future The first quarter of 2007 is drawing to a close, and it’s a good time to think about what we have seen so far this year in our part of the pharmaceutical marketing research world and whether it reflects change and/or progress from 2006. Some things seem to have calmed down and lost their intensity over recent quarters, both in substance and logistics, but much remains the same. The first thing that comes to mind is the interest level, or rather increasing lack thereof, in Longitudinal Patient Data. Just two years ago, conferences and seminars were held almost weekly on this topic, and most were heavily attended. Several companies offered competing databases, and articles and advertisements on the topic were everywhere. In fact, it was the only new marketing research tool to garner interest in a long time. Unfortunately, while we did learn some interesting new information about patient persistence, brand switching, concomitant therapy, etc., these new data sets did not permit us to obtain enough added value to redirect our marketing programs. Thus, as the months have progressed, while some pharmaceutical companies are still purchasing these data, they have not caused the paradigm shift that individual physician-level prescribing did a decade earlier, and their chatter value has diminished significantly. Amazingly, the same thing has happened with pharmaceutical marketing and marketing research applications of the Internet, e-detailing and other interactive and/or electronic media. When the Internet first appeared on the scene, it seemed like it was going to revolutionize pharmaceutical marketing to physicians and patients alike. Scroll forward to 2006-2007, and we find that the hundreds of people who used to show up for seminars on the topic have largely gone away, and most pharmaceutical marketers continue to rely on Pharmaceutical Sales Representatives and other traditional marketing channels as their primary marketing techniques. Why? Quite simply, we learned that content and meeting needs were more important than technology in causing a paradigm shift, and as an industry we have yet to get it right how physicians are looking for us to use these new technologies. Sure, patients with stomachaches and UTIs continue to go to the Internet to seek information, and online CME has become a popular vehicle for physicians. But the excitement and chatter value of pushing these media, as well as the marketing research conducted on this front, has subsided rather substantially. As to the logistics of marketing research, things also seem to have calmed down significantly. Several years ago, pharmaceutical companies and agencies were aflutter about working out processes and procedures related to Master Service Agreements, Preferred Provider Agreements and the like. But most of this has been worked through, if not to the point of mutual satisfaction, at least to the point of relative quiescence. Not much to talk about here anymore, either. Even the involvement of pharmaceutical marketing research in reporting Adverse Events with drugs, an extremely hot topic in 2006, has now been worked through at least to a point at which each pharmaceutical company, typically acting on its own and with little guidance from outside sources, has developed Standard Operating Procedures for dealing with this issue. To my awareness, no lawsuits, federal injunctions or other hot potatoes have popped up here, with the net result again being relative quiet. One way to gauge the lack of interesting topics in pharmaceutical marketing research today is to examine the content of and attendance at meetings. Commercial vendors, the likes of “CBI,” “IIR” and “SRI” that organize “seminars,” which used to draw hundreds of participants, each with several thousand dollars in hand for two-day sessions in the days when genuinely new phenomena, such as Direct-To-Consumer advertising, were being introduced and worked through, are now running relatively old and hackneyed seminars on topics like “How to Introduce Your New Product,” and are not surprisingly drawing “crowds” of 35 to 40 for each session, half of them speakers. So, against this backdrop and the lack of anything new to be excited about in pharmaceutical marketing research, how do we rig pharmaceutical marketing research for the future? Realize that procurement procedures in many pharmaceutical companies are reducing the purchasing of pharmaceutical marketing research to a commodity process in which each component project of a product’s marketing research plan is awarded to the lowest bidder, recognize that senior management in many pharmaceutical companies has become so frustrated with our profession's efforts that they are turning to the “big management consulting companies” instead for guidance on important issues, and you will certainly conclude that we need to do something, and quickly, if pharmaceutical marketing researchers are not to wake up one day in the not-so-distant future and find themselves relegated to “looking up” data as we did several decades ago. Which brings us to the doorstep of the problem. Much of what goes on in pharmaceutical marketing research today is simply the continuation of activities that have gone on for decades. While these activities may have been valuable at the time, many have long since outlived their usefulness. However, for the pharmaceutical marketing researcher working within a drug company, whose primary function is often to attend meetings and to support individual products, there is little opportunity to work for meaningful change. Especially under today’s tightening regulatory environment, any changes are more likely to be driven by compliance than creativity. Similarly, for those of us working on the agency side, we are all incentivized in one way or the other to sell and do as many projects as possible. Certainly, the easiest way is to do exactly the same kinds of projects we did last year, preferably on a larger scale and at a higher price. Meaningful change, therefore, is not likely to come from these organizations either. So how do we fix all of this? First, we need to understand that while in the “good old days,” we did market research, i.e., looked up numbers to determine the size of markets, today we do marketing research, i.e., assisting other members of the product team in determining how to market their drugs optimally throughout their life cycle. Thus, a question we must first be comfortable answering is whether the pharmaceutical industry is willing to modify its Pharmaceutical Sales Representative-driven model of reach times frequency intrusion marketing, and move in a direction more toward customer (including physician, patient and other stakeholders) satisfaction. If the answer is no, we can continue to do business as usual, and interpret the recent announcements of significant reductions in sales force sizes by several major pharmaceutical companies as accounting moves rather than paradigm shifts. If, on the other hand, we believe as I do that the current pharmaceutical marketing model is broken, then we as pharmaceutical marketing researchers can help fix it. But we are talking about a major overhaul, not a small tweak, and the question is who has the time and expertise to focus on this transition. Rather than going through the work of coming up with a new idea here, I’d rather do what I usually do and steal an idea that works from some other industry. More specifically, I believe what we need is a “think tank” or “institute,” funded by pharmaceutical companies, that will assemble a small group of bright people who will work full time to discern what is right and what is wrong with pharmaceutical marketing as it currently exists, brainstorm potential solutions and offer their recommendations back to the sponsoring companies to do with as they will. To be honestly dishonest, I stole this idea from Nicholas Negroponte, who years ago established the Media Lab, which was funded by companies that chipped in a significant but not overwhelming number of dollars. No specific product of the Lab was guaranteed to any client, but each client could observe the best thinking of Negroponte and his associates, and use this creativity to spark “out of the box” activities at their own companies. I also stole the idea from our own parent company, GfK, which each year assembles an “Excellence Team” of young/bright/upcoming associates from across our companies/across industries/across the world to work for that year on an issue such as “integration,” “innovation,” etc. This group is given access to the highest level of management in the corporation, and never fails to come back at year-end with recommendations that never would have been thought of were it not for its efforts. In brief, we need such a dedicated effort in the pharmaceutical industry, carried out by people who care enough to make it right and experienced and savvy enough to know right when they see it, to rethink and study the fundamental assumptions of pharmaceutical marketing, i.e., detailing physicians more frequently leads to greater sales, and in general, to decide what is being done right, what is being done wrong and how to fix issues that fall into the latter category. Nearer and dearer to all of our hearts, I believe that a key by-product of such efforts will be a new understanding of what pharmaceutical marketing research should be done and how the function should be organized in the future to serve the new vision of marketing. Then, my friends, we will have something genuinely new to talk about in pharmaceutical marketing research! Richard B. Vanderveer, Ph.D. Group Chief Executive Officer GfK U.S. Healthcare Companies