Global marketing has been talked about in the pharmaceutical industry for years, but now that the United States accounts for less and less profitability, we must look carefully and thoughtfully at other countries, especially developing countries, to begin to maximize their potential.
This month’s published document for The Orange Pages takes an in-depth look at the pharmaceutical marketplace of Latin America. Not a random choice, Latin America constitutes one of the biggest areas of growth potential in pharmaceutical marketing research and is a significant portion of the world for which the GfK U.S. Healthcare Companies is responsible, in addition to the United States and Canada.
Fueled largely by improving economies and more favorable attitudes toward the protection of intellectual property, Latin America is now the world’s second fastest-growing pharmaceutical market after China and is expected to grow at an annual rate of 10 percent between 2005 and 2010. This will result in a retail market value of more than $45 billion by 2010. But this aggregate figure is misleading, in that it is compounded from the contributions of many separate countries that manage health care and pharmaceuticals in very different and idiosyncratic ways.
While Latin America can be viewed as a pharmaceutical marketplace per se, it is not a unified structure, but rather a series of individual countries and cultures, each offering its own opportunity profile. The predominant market for pharmaceuticals in Latin America is Brazil, which is also one of the top 10 pharmaceutical markets in the world. As the “B” in the BRIC countries, Brazil is expected to grow faster than the rest of Latin America. Argentina, Peru, Chile, Venezuela and Colombia are other significant players in the pharmaceutical marketplace of 2008.
Using country-to-country comparisons, this article shows that Latin American pharmaceutical markets are significantly different from those in the United States and G5 countries. More specifically, while the traditional, large pharmaceutical companies are active in Latin America, most of the current and anticipated growth in these markets derives from the local manufacture of generics. Even among other emerging countries, the advantages and disadvantages of doing business in Latin American markets, as well as the rules of engagement, differ significantly.
To be successful players in the global game, pharmaceutical marketers and marketing researchers must develop a new and different world view to adapt to Latin America in general and its specific countries in particular. This will involve learning how medicine is practiced, how physicians go about making their treatment and prescribing decisions, and how patient expectations are similar to and different from those in the United States.
To download the complete March 2008 discussion on Latin America as a prototype of global pharmaceutical marketing research, please click here.
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