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.

Two key forces are driving the anticipated massive changes in the pharmaceutical industry’s future. First, the rise of pharmaceutical marketing in the developing countries and second, significant issues with the current approach to pharmaceutical marketing in the developed countries.

To parallel these forces at play, the article titled “Revolutionary Marketing Research for an Evolutionary Pharmaceutical Market” proffers two related but distinctly different research directions that will need to be pursued as quickly as possible if marketing researchers working for pharmaceutical companies and the research agencies that service them are to provide meaningful direction for the future:

• The first research direction is to determine in the developed countries (typically defined as the United States, the G5 countries and Japan) which elements of pharmaceutical marketing work and which are superfluous or perhaps even deleterious. Based on such an analysis by marketing researchers, we would likely create a “Pharmaceutical Marketing 2.0” very different than the one employed today.



• The second meta-challenge in pursuing revolutionary marketing research is to gain a far better understanding of health care delivery as it is practiced in developing countries and pharmaceutical marketing as it should be practiced in these countries. Although much talk has been heard in recent years about pharmaceutical marketing being global, we have limited most of our marketing research, and thus most of our understanding, to the developed countries, as defined above.

To download the article, Revolutionary Marketing Research for an Evolutionary Pharmaceutical Market, please click here.

Pieces of the vision outlined in this article are already becoming a reality. Be sure to read this month’s Vanderveer’s Views, which details actions GfK is taking to spearhead research initiatives in the developing countries. What GfK learns from these exercises in Latin America and other developing regions will be shared with clients in the near future.


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