To be efficient marketing researchers in today’s environment, we need to multipurpose virtually everything we do. And to do this, we must build a centralized knowledgebase to which all appropriate personnel have user-friendly access. The idea for this month’s Orange Pages came from an associate at a major pharmaceutical company who has been studying centralized bases of marketing research information within drug companies. Having seen such knowledgebases assembled with great effort, she observed that little use was made of them and wondered if there were any golden rules for getting people to use this information once collected.
Besides raising the level of importance of knowledgebases, other keys for getting marketing researchers to use them include developing training programs in health care marketing research analysis and the use of supporting databases and instituting a change in organizational culture. Even the best constructed pharmaceutical marketing research knowledgebase will lie unused if we do not embed it in a push program, rather than relying upon associates who have not been brought up to speed on the cost-effectiveness, time-effectiveness and additional insights that can be enjoyed by using a database to think of pulling information as their first line of defense. It is my prediction, however, that as health care marketing becomes increasingly challenging, e.g., by involving a far greater number of stakeholders, and as budgets become increasingly constricted, we will see far greater reliance on such sources of information.
To download the complete October 2009 discussion Build It and They May Come, please click here.
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Issues Exploration for Today’s Health Care Marketing Researcher”
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