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| January 2008 | ||||||||
 The New Marketing - and Marketing Research - Focus on Key Opinion Leaders
This month's published document for The
Orange Pages focuses on Key
Opinion Leaders (KOLs) as increasingly central
players in the pharmaceutical marketing and
marketing research process. While using KOLs in
pharmaceutical marketing research is not a new
concept, they are being used more often for two
reasons. First, it is more cost-effective to
use KOLs for
a variety of tasks than send out a phalanx of
100,000
representatives to detail physicians. And
second,
many of the products now being introduced are
specialty products that are being sold to
high-powered
specialists who demand complicated answers that
only KOLs can provide.
For these reasons, there is a need to
better
use the
knowledge, credibility and expertise of KOLs
in the
current environment. To assist in this task,
several
companies specializing exclusively in the KOL
business are working with pharmaceutical
manufacturers - some of which have set aside
millions of dollars to fund such initiatives
- to identify,
build and maintain KOL databases.
 What Lies Beneath: Using Projective Techniques to Get to Emotional Brand Drivers and Barriers
By Bart Weiner, Group Chief Operating Officer,
GfK U.S.
Healthcare Companies
You just bought a new car. A BMW to be exact.
As you
pull into the office in your new wheels, a
co-worker
takes notice and asks why you chose a BMW. How
would you respond?
While you talk about BMW's high level of
performance,
reliability and level of service - the
rational reasons
behind your choice - you may also be thinking
about
the prestige and status you feel as a BMW
owner - the
underlying emotional attachments you have
associated with the BMW brand.
While the rational decisions for purchasing a
product
are telling, it is sometimes more important
to probe
deeper and uncover the meaning behind those
choices. Particularly in today's highly
competitive
pharmaceutical market full of crowded
categories and
undifferentiated product features, marketers
need to
tap into the emotional aspects of brand
choice to
make a brand stick.
Revolutionary Marketing Research for an Evolutionary Pharmaceutical Market
Let's face it, much of the day-to-day
pharmaceutical marketing research is more
about the way pharmaceutical marketing used
to be than the way it is now, let alone will
be in the future.
Change is on the horizon. And so in addition
to conducting research designed to support
the marketing activities of today,
pharmaceutical marketing researchers need to
conduct revolutionary research that will
provide direction for the evolutionary
changes anticipated in pharmaceutical
marketing over the years to come. In an
article authored for Next-Generation
Pharmaceutical, Richard B. Vanderveer,
Ph.D., group chief executive officer of the
GfK U.S. Healthcare Companies, explains his
"Pharmaceutical Marketing 2.0" concept and
his vision for the future of the
pharmaceutical industry.
Did You Miss the December Issue of Topline?
Click
here to read the issue, which includes:
NEW - Topline archive now available! Skim the directory and select articles you missed. Access subscriber opt-in/comment form. |
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 Latin America, Here We Come! My colleagues at GfK headquarters in Germany recently informed me that, along with being responsible for their three U.S. health care companies, my preaching about the PricewaterhouseCoopers prediction that pharmaceutical industry sales would double by 2020 largely from developing countries that could not afford premium pricing on drugs for their millions of patients had led GfK to make me and my colleague, Bart Weiner, responsible for increasing our health care marketing research business in Latin America and Canada. While flattered, Bart and I were also somewhat flabbergasted, since we know nothing about health care delivery, pharmaceutical marketing, etc., in these countries except what we learned by viewing "Sicko," the enlightening Michael Moore movie on which I have already written. Where to start?...  Richard B. Vanderveer, Ph.D. Group Chief Executive Officer GfK U.S. Healthcare Companies   Recommended Resource: MM&M's Pipeline 2008  What are the promising drugs of 2008? Medical
Marketing & Media's "Pipeline 2008" looks at
pharmaceutical products under development and
highlights 17 that are generating the most
buzz in
major categories. Six
GfK U.S. Healthcare Companies marketing
researchers are featured in the piece
providing their
expert opinions on both the therapeutic
classes and
specific drugs covered.
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