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I’ve had some really wacky experiences in my career as a pharmaceutical
marketing researcher. Many of the wackiest have involved people with reason
to know better failing to see the integral connection between marketing
and marketing research.
Two key examples come to mind. The first was when I invited Seth Godin,
one of the greatest marketing gurus and visionaries of our time, to give
a keynote speech at a PMRG conference I was chairing in Orlando. Seth
gave one of his usual scintillating presentations, this time based on
his “Purple Cow” book, and fascinated me as always. What really
got me, though, was the fact that several people came up to me afterward
to ask why I had invited a “marketing guy” to a marketing
research meeting, since they could not see a connection between the two.
The other occasion that rocked my socks happened a few years ago when
an abstract for one of my presentations, dealing with assumptions that
we implicitly make every time we use a particular marketing research methodology,
was rejected by the association hosting the conference, with a note indicating,
once again, that marketing researchers would have no interest in exploring
the marketing foundations of the research methodologies they employ on
a daily basis.
In case the two examples have failed to make it clear, I strongly believe
that unless one has a firm and up-to-date understanding of underlying
marketing principles, one is doomed to do mediocre marketing research
at best and hopelessly misleading marketing research at worst.
Up against this belief I have assembled below, in no particular order,
a few examples of some key but erroneous assumptions that pharmaceutical
marketing researchers make every day. They include:
- Physicians make a discrete, rational decision every
time they write a prescription. In fact, there are now many
entries in each class of drug, with often many being branded and many
being generic. It would be foolhardy and time consuming for a physician
to consider all the features of all these drugs each time (s)he initiates
therapy with an agent in this class. In point of fact, most physicians
develop habits as to when to use the drug class in general, and which
drug to use when a drug from this class is selected. Sometimes this
drug is selected based on its being the first in its class, sometimes
because it is perceived as having superiority on major characteristics
such as efficacy or safety, or sometimes based on its formulary tier
status on the patient’s health plan. Whatever the driving force,
the average prescription is written based on habit, rather than a
thorough mental review of all the products that could be used in this
situation.
- Physicians use a compensatory model in selecting products.
In questioning physicians about pharmaceutical products, we often
ask physicians to break down a product and rate it on efficacy, safety,
price, etc. Even as pharmaceutical marketing researchers with a firm
grounding in marketing, we often lose sight of the fact that high
scores on one dimension often will not make up for low scores on others.
A product tends to be viewed by physicians as a whole, rather than
as a series of dimensions, and we must keep this in fact in mind in
constructing our marketing research instruments and questions.
- Physicians have perfect knowledge about our products and
the competition. Many of the projects we conduct for the
pharmaceutical industry are referred to as KAP studies, an acronym
for knowledge, attitudes and practices. Often, we unfortunately assume
knowledge on the part of physicians, and proceed to ask them questions
about their attitudes and practices on topics about which they know
little or nothing. Needless to say, the “information”
that is produced under such circumstances is garbage at best. That
having been said, one must be very cautious in asking a physician
what (s)he knows on a particular topic, lest (s)he become defensive.
- The more often they hear about a product, the more physicians
will prescribe it. Among urban legends in pharmaceutical
marketing and marketing research, one of the most misleading is the
belief that the more often we shout a product’s features and
benefits at a physician, the more likely (s)he will be to prescribe
it. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent every year deciding
how many times a particular physician, with a specific level of prescribing
“potential,” will receive a “reminder detail.’’
While such shout volume titrations may in fact work for some physicians
(e.g., doctors who use several products in a particular drug class
interchangeably) and in certain drug classes (e.g., where numerous,
virtually interchangeable drugs are available), the general rule is
that doctors have either accepted or rejected a product for use in
a particular treatment area, and that no amount of repetitive reminding,
devoid of new information and/or accompanied by drug samples, is likely
to have a significant impact on prescribing level. The fact that most
of the presentations made by the almost 100,000 pharmaceutical sales
representatives in the United States alone are reminder details makes
this fact especially important to remember, and as pharmaceutical
marketing researchers get more and more involved in measuring sales
force effectiveness, it is of increasingly greater importance to incorporate
such understanding in our project work.
In summary, there are hundreds of urban legends and widely held assumptions
in pharmaceutical marketing and marketing research that, if one is not
careful, cannot only invalidate the results of the projects we conduct
but look extremely credible as well. This is an extremely dangerous combination
when the results of the study are used as the basis of making major business
decisions. Understanding how marketing really works, how doctors really
think, etc., turns out to be at least as important as understanding how
to utilize the latest marketing research methodology, since it helps the
researcher to avoid hundreds of bad assumptions about how things really
work, and thus to avoid conducting meaningless, or even financially dangerous,
pharmaceutical marketing research.
Richard B. Vanderveer, Ph.D.
Group Chief Executive Officer
GfK U.S. Healthcare Companies
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