October 2007
	The Year in Review It’s hard to believe, but this month marks the one year anniversary of our “Topline” newsletter and my ranting in this column about the forces we have seen at work, hated to have seen at work and would love to see at work in pharmaceutical marketing and marketing research. Thus, it seems a good time to look in the rearview mirror at the monthly articles we have pecked out, strike an overview and see what, if anything, has changed. In the October 2006 issue, we discussed a couple of major trends we thought needed airing out into the pharmaceutical marketing research community. First, we noted with some enthusiasm that pharmaceutical companies were beginning to move away from focusing the majority of their marketing research on comparing their product with the competition’s on various attributes. Increasingly, we noted, companies were moving in the direction of studying issues, such as how physicians consume information and why some patients comply while others don’t. We have seen continued, if slow, progress in this direction over the past year, with pharmaceutical companies turning their research attention to the study of fundamental issues necessary to understand how to create win-win relationships among major stakeholders in the delivery of health care and the marketing of pharmaceuticals, although product-related research still predominates. The involvement of marketing research in the reporting of drug Adverse Events was also a hot topic, and one that threatened to shut down the conduct of pharmaceutical marketing research if a suitable set of rules could not be generated to satisfy all involved, and most particularly the federal government. In the ensuing months, this issue has settled down rather dramatically, with each pharmaceutical company, in isolation, having developed a training program for its researchers and their contractors that must be completed before a project is conducted. Efforts by our professional organizations to create standards for such training programs went nowhere, and we have yet to hear from any governmental sources as to the acceptability of training and compliance programs that have been put forth. Thus, while this issue seems to have calmed down for the time being, don’t be surprised if it raises its head again. November’s issue talked about the shifting nature of the relationship between pharmaceutical companies and the marketing research agencies that service them. We followed the steps from informal, hand-shake deals through Master Service Agreements, Preferred Vendor Agreements and now Agency of Record status. I am sorry to say we have made little progress in this area since this piece was penned. Contract negotiations still take up huge chunks of my management’s time, and marketing research professionals within pharmaceutical companies increasingly take umbrage at the amount of involvement that their purchasing or procurement departments have in the selection of contractors who will eventually do the project. In brief, much wasted motion, more acrimony and little or no increase in project quality or decrease in project price have been the outcomes. And, worse yet, we see no likely improvement in sight. In December, we wrote about “Pharmaceutical Marketing Old Wives’ Tales,” i.e., fundamental assumptions that may or may not be true on which pharmaceutical marketers base their marketing efforts. Basic concepts like “The more time you visit a doctor and do a ‘reminder’ detail, the more of your product (s)he will prescribe” all need careful thought, study and understanding, since our behavior based on these assumptions costs us billions of dollars a year. Since we wrote that article, many major pharmaceutical companies have cut their sales forces by 10 percent or more, but the question still remains as to whether their numbers should simply be reduced by rather small percentages or their activities fundamentally changed or eliminated altogether. In brief, we need to question how pharmaceutical marketing works, whether repetition is the sine qua non it has been believed to be, and other assumptions we have long held if we are to truly do more with less in pharmaceutical marketing of years to come. January 2007 found us writing about the role pharmaceutical marketing research, and marketing researchers, should play in the overall pharmaceutical marketing endeavor. Our professional organizations are struggling to carve out meaningful roles, both on an absolute and relative basis. Which of these organizations, if any, is responsible for assisting pharmaceutical companies in training new marketing researchers to do a superior job for their internal clients? Brian Cain, in accepting his well-deserved R.R. Fordyce Award at PMRG last month, lauded Dick Fordyce, his mentor and friend, for establishing a position of respect within Ortho that found senior management leaning heavily on his advice in their decision making. Brian and I both believe that each of us must establish in our companies this same kind of credibility, and none of us has made much progress in this area since this article was written. If anything, we have slid backward as pharmaceutical companies have trimmed spending, with marketing research FTEs and research budgets among the first victims. In February, we explored the question of “What’s it like to be a physician?” Consistent with the previous discussion of “old wives’ tales,” we fervently believe that you cannot meet the needs of the customer unless you know what they are and not just make assumptions like physicians are sponges for all kinds of archaic scientific information, even if they never use it in their practices. Rather, a little study finds that physicians value their time preciously and allocate it as best they can to efficiently collecting information that will help them be better doctors not just “stuff that is interesting.” While we have not made much progress in this area in the ensuing months, still being an industry that is far more product focused than customer focused, such research techniques as ethnography are being increasingly utilized to gain understanding in depth of what goes on in a doctor’s office and in his/her life on a daily basis. March saw us writing about “rigging” marketing research for the future. Here, we talked about not just grinding out the same old research and reporting areas of problem, but developing the core competencies and reputation to help find solutions as well. To accomplish this goal, I believe, we may have to start with a virtually clean slate, ridding ourselves of the baggage of the past, making note of new forces at work in the marketplace and developing out of whole cloth new methodologies for researching those forces and strategies to deal with them. April was about readying “Bold new strategies for a discontinuous future.” The major point here was that the pharmaceutical industry is changing and we had best start to prepare how to respond to a world without patent protection and to learn to do scenario planning around how to optimize profitability under such circumstances. Such activities go well beyond the traditional role of marketing research, and we will have to begin by identifying professionals with relevant core competencies and organizing these futurists into structures that can respond quickly and efficiently. May explored the early, and dismal, attempts of the pharmaceutical industry to employ various “e” media, including the Internet, in our marketing efforts. We reported that, as we all know, these attempts largely failed for all the usual reasons utilization of new technologies fails, including using the new technology to do what the old technology it was designed to replace did (e.g., early TV programs were simply “talking heads” in front of microphones, replicating the experience of listening to the radio) and running numerous, small pilot projects that were not sufficiently thought out or funded to give the new technology a fair evaluation. Pharmaceutical E-Marketing 2.0, we believe, must rely heavily on asynchronous, inexpensive e-technology to thrive, and on robust pilot studies to help develop these approaches. In June I wrote proudly but humbly on the topic of receiving the Mary Clement Lifetime Achievement Award at PBIRG. Looking back, I thanked the clients and colleagues without whose faith, efforts and vision I could not have accomplished even a small percentage of what we have done so far, and looking forward, I reminded the assemblage that receiving this award in no way meant I was done contributing. Face it, pharmaceutical marketing is broken, and I’m not leaving the industry until, with your help, we make significant progress toward fixing it. As July rolled around, I turned my attention to “Closed-Loop Marketing” and the attempts of several pharmaceutical companies to use tablet-based computers to collect information about called-on physicians and use it to tailor subsequent detail presentations. This is a good idea, with several flaws. The first of these is that physicians have learned that when the Pharmaceutical Sales Representative (PSR) pulls out a computer for a presentation, it will probably be longer than they are willing to stand still for and, once started, is not easy to make it go away. Second, most companies have nothing new to say about most of their products, and using a computer to deliver an information-free presentation does not make the physician feel a bit better about wasting time. Last but far from least, no one has figured out how to use previous physician reactions to guide subsequent presentations. If, for example, a physician rated the efficacy component of a presentation a “9” on a 1-to-9 scale the last three times it was shown, does that mean the doctor has received full value from that part of the presentation and the PSR should move on to something else on the next visit, or that the physician feels efficacy is so important that it should be “hit” again on the next call? Nobody knows the answer to this question, and, worse yet, the answer probably varies by physician. Look for closed-loop marketing to come and go several more times before we finally get it right. In August, we dealt with the all-important topic of how physicians and consumers search out and utilize medical information. We discussed the fact, obvious though it may be, that in no situation are such searchers anxious to encounter a hodgepodge of information but rather expect to find information presented in a user-friendly, consistent format. We also discussed the value of studying the electronic footprints left by those conducting searches, which enable us to see what search words they employ, what order of sites they review, how long they spend on each page, etc. By analyzing such trails, we can learn what information about a condition, drug, etc. is valued, and use it to guide future informational campaigns. Finally, we turn to September’s offering in which we explored GfK Healthcare’s vision for future. In this piece, I suggested that we focus on three different but interconnected activities. First, we must continue to service the day-to-day information needs of our internal clients. Product-to-product comparison is not nearly as important as it was when fewer, less interchangeable products were available, and when managed care didn’t often blunt the prescriber’s choice in any event. But our internal clients will still want us to conduct such historically rooted projects, and we must continue to do so on a timely, excellent and efficient basis. Second, while all this goes on, we must realize that at the present time pharmaceutical marketing in the United States is being conducted on a rather inefficient basis, wasting physician time and shareholder resources alike, and will need to be changed rather substantially in the future. Pharmaceutical Marketing 2.0, as we anticipate it, will focus on Total Customer Satisfaction rather than on reach and frequency, and the use of asynchronous, interactive electronic communications devices rather than live PSRs who intrude at their convenience, not the physician’s. Third, PricewaterhouseCoopers and others have reported that while the top line of the pharmaceutical industry will double by 2020, much of the growth will come from the developing countries (e.g., E7, BRIC), where marketing methods can be expected to be very different from, and profit margins significantly lower than, those historically employed/enjoyed in the United States and even other developed countries. Therefore, the final piece of the GfK Healthcare vision for the future is to develop, for ourselves and our clients, a clear understanding of how health care is delivered in the developing countries, how pharmaceuticals are marketed there as well as what the trends and who the stakeholders are. In brief, it has been an interesting year to write about in the pharmaceutical industry, and I have greatly appreciated the feedback from many of you along the way. We’ll keep slogging at it for the next year and keep you apprised of the changes in a very dynamic pharmaceutical marketplace and suggest how you as a pharmaceutical marketing researcher can contribute to and profit from these changes. Richard B. Vanderveer, Ph.D. Group Chief Executive Officer GfK U.S. Healthcare Companies