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February 2009
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  What Happens When Three Become One?As many of you know, GfK has, as of Jan. 15, taken its three health care companies, GfK Market Measures, GfK Strategic Marketing and GfK V2, and joined them into one entity – GfK Healthcare. As we progressed through 2008, a very important reason emerged for forming this union, and much of the year was spent figuring out how to optimize the synergies among the three companies. Quite simply, when GfK acquired NOP in 2005, it made sense to us, although we were bringing the companies together to constitute the GfK health care representation in the United States, to allow them to operate independently in a number of different ways. First, we allowed GfK V2 to retain its individual identity, believing, and I think correctly, that this brand carried substantial equity. We also revivified the corporate identities of Market Measures and Strategic Marketing, adding GfK to each of their corporate names to demonstrate their connection to each other and to the corporate entity based in Nuremberg, Germany. Although we met regularly and exchanged ideas, on a day-to-day basis the companies largely operated independently. Each had its own strengths and weaknesses, its own brand identity and its own loyal following of clients. But most importantly, at the time pharmaceutical marketing research was largely conceptualized of and conducted at a level of project size well within the scope of each of these companies. More recently, although much of marketing research still focuses on helping our product team beat the competition, health care marketing research has turned to bigger issues. Managed care, multitier co-pays, patient compliance and globalization have become issues that are increasingly put under the microscope of managed care. Secondary data are increasingly being combined with primary data to help accomplish this end, and the perspectives of many stakeholders, not just physicians, are of increasing interest. From an organizational standpoint, these trends indicated that we would need a larger, more multidisciplinary team than was available under any of our individual company’s roofs. We also recognized that when we took a bigger viewpoint, all the elements necessary to deal with these more complex issues were resident within our group of companies. They were simply not seamlessly connected and grouped in optimal, i.e., flexible, teams. Thus, throughout 2008, we increasingly moved toward the decision, and announced in July to our employees (and now, more than six months later, to you), that we would unite our three U.S. health care companies into one, with this move in itself being an intermediate step toward the unification of GfK companies around the globe that deal in whole or part with health care in their practices. Several characteristics of the reorganization are important to note. First and most importantly, the combined organization has been built around a series of key account managers, or KAMs, each of whom is responsible for serving as the interface with one or more of our client companies. By understanding the issues, preferences, politics, etc., of their assigned companies, they can best be of service to them. These KAMs are backed up, of course, by researchers with expertise in every treatment area and methodology, so that they can assemble a team maximally responsive to a client’s specific needs. Another key aspect of combining the organizations was to do it in such a way as to match the clients’ preferred ways of doing business. For example, while some clients still cling to the three- bidder system, others have moved on to more progressive relationships, such as agency of record status for agencies with which they work exclusively in a given treatment area. Again, the KAM responsible for working with each of these different kinds of accounts would understand their systems and organize our approach in such a way as to not only meet the marketing research requirements of the client, but the procedural requirements of the increasingly powerful “procurement” departments as well. With more than 250 professionals working in the new combined company, GfK Healthcare has the capacity to maintain leadership in health care research. Special teams, for example, have been assembled to develop new products and services responsive to the marketing research needs of today, and to do so cost-effectively. Our critical mass also makes it possible for us to keep up with the latest trends in other areas of business and port them to our colleagues, both within pharmaceutical companies and our competitors, through educational efforts such as presentations and articles. Moreover, we can take the experience of our colleagues working for GfK in other countries, as well as those working in verticals other than health care, and apply it to the evolving health care marketplace. I would be remiss if I did not mention the restructuring in management that has accompanied our new, unified company. More specifically, my title of group chief executive officer goes away since there is no longer a group of companies, so I am pleased to become CEO of the new, integrated GfK Healthcare. My primary responsibilities in this role will continue to be the setting of the vision for the company and the communication of this vision through interaction with clients both in person and through professional media. Whereas I was formerly assisted by three extremely capable company presidents, the weight of running the day-to-day operations of the combined entity now falls solely on the shoulders of Barry Zimmerman, who had served as president of GfK Market Measures. Barry’s many years in the industry, including management experience at IMS, puts him in good stead for his new post. I should emphasize, by the way, that you should feel free to contact either Barry or me if you have comments, positive or negative, on how the new organization is functioning, or suggestions as to how it could be made to function better. Speaking of which, I would be remiss if I did not reemphasize that one of the key goals of bringing together this new organization is efficiency. It is very clear to us across GfK Healthcare that the pharmaceutical industry is in dire straits, and anything we can do to improve the situation by increasing the efficiency of health care we should do. Efficiency, it should be noted, does not just mean, or even primarily mean, having each project done by the lowest bidder. Rather, our emphasis in redefining efficiency is getting the maximum bang for the buck from each piece of research conducted by using every modern procedure, such as off-shoring research to increase efficiency, and in many cases convincing the client that there is no need to conduct marketing research at all. So there you have it. Instead of three companies working primarily product promotion-related marketing research projects, we have now together a unified, efficient GfK Healthcare to better meet the needs of the health care marketing research community. My team is ready for the future, and we look forward to working to improve the delivery of medical care, the treatment experience of patients and the profitability of our client companies. Big challenges demand response from teams that are both wide and deep, and we have all of that and more. I encourage you to learn more about our transition to GfK Healthcare and the state of the industry in general, both now and looking to the future, by reading a recent Pharma Market Research Report article in which Barry and I were interviewed. You will be dealing with an entirely new GfK Healthcare in 2009, and we are sure you will be quite pleased by the experience. 
Richard B. Vanderveer, Ph.D. CEO, GfK Healthcare 
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