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September 2009
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  A Renewed Search for UnderstandingFor what feels like a long time now, pharmaceutical companies have seemed to demonstrate little interest in understanding how things work in marketing and marketing research. Surely, the conduct of marketing research projects has continued apace, albeit at a pace estimated at some 35 percent slower than in recent years. What virtually disappeared, however, was the emphasis on getting a basic orientation in pharmaceutical marketing research. Customers have increasingly been reduced to being viewed as market share, which was never really acceptable but is now even less so in an increasingly complicated marketplace. Interviews with numerous clients have revealed several manifestations and causes for this reality. First, clients consistently over the years have failed to keep up with the business literature, both health care specific and more generally. As we keep trying to persuade clients, much of the knowledge they seek through the conduct of expensive marketing research is already available in books and on Internet sites. One of the major roles that I attempt to serve in my job at GfK Healthcare is to guide clients in this direction. But the good news is that clients are starting to reawaken to the need not just for specific marketing research results, but also for a basic understanding of how things work now, and how they will work in the future. Increasingly, clients are calling on me to visit with their marketing research departments and lecture them on the basics of marketing research, but also on future trends that will reconstitute the organization and work flow of their departments. Reminder courses in basics need to be offered since, over recent years, the types of fundamental marketing research training seminars that used to be offered regularly by my organization and others have dried up as new members of the department are thrown right into the conduct of projects, with their managers unwilling to “waste” time on initial training and believing that the new researchers will learn what they need to learn through on-the-job training. Conversely, my presentations on the future of marketing research are increasingly in demand since most pharmaceutical companies, mired in the ways of the past and understaffed, do not have the time to review available secondary sources, do scenario planning, or conduct other activities required to respond to the fundamental changes in health care, and health care marketing research, that are just around the corner. Again, reductions in headcount and budgets are requiring that companies experiencing this awakening do so extremely cost effectively. Perhaps the most valuable guidance I can offer in this regard, based on the experience of working with most of the major pharmaceutical companies, is that more time should be given to organizing and contemplating the information already under the company’s roof, and to gaining full value from each additional piece of marketing research information collected, than to conducting large numbers of marketing research projects to which their internal customers often pay little attention, thus receiving only a small part of the value that could be extracted from these costly efforts. In a recent discussion with a highly tapped-in client, for example, we focused on the fact that many health care marketing researchers believe that in a project involving the conduct of Individual Depth Interviews with physicians, the more interviews that can be conducted in a day, the better. If I’m going to Chicago to watch marketing research, this line of reasoning goes, the more interviews I can watch in a day, the less of my time, travel expenses, etc., will be consumed. My recommendation to them was that far more effective marketing research can be conducted if the focus is less on how many interviews are conducted in a day and more on how much value is extracted from the research process. Translated into English, this means that some of the best work I believe we have ever done has consisted of doing a one-hour interview, followed by a one-hour discussion of what we learned from that encounter and how, if at all, the interviewing process should be changed, followed by another one-hour interview, etc. While at the end of the day “only” five or six interviews may have been completed, my experience has been that the understanding of the knowledge, attitudes, practices, wants, needs, etc., of the respondents is far more robust than if we had ground out a dozen interviews. Less can be more! Try it, you’ll like it. Additionally, we discussed the fact that in cultures such as Japan, it is considered entirely appropriate and responsible for company associates to be seen reading books relevant to their work in the office. In the United States, on the other hand, seeing someone reading in the office is both unusual and considered inappropriate, thus requiring researchers to read key literature on the decreasing amount of “their own time.” My observation over the years is that health care marketing researchers are woefully under-read in books with which they should have intimate knowledge, often causing them to do marketing research in a less than cost-effective manner and in many cases to conduct marketing research that need not really be conducted at all. All of the challenges above are worsened by the fact that pharmaceutical companies are typically organized by brand, with very little interchange of information among brands. Thus, it is far from unusual to see within a company the same project being done time after time, simply because brand teams fail to communicate with each other and/or to develop a collective body of knowledge into which the various brands can dip. As marketing research budgets get tighter and tighter, this isolationistic way of doing business will obviously need to change. In recent years, a great concern among health care researchers on both sides of the table has been that marketing research was becoming a “commodity,” with the company being selected to conduct a project increasingly the result of who would provide the most pounds of research for the fewest number of dollars. Mercifully, reason is starting to return to this arena, and the quality of the insights reached and the actionability of the conclusions and recommendations made are slowly but surely returning as major considerations. Marketing research budgets remain limited, however, and are likely to become more so. Thus, we must strive to resist the urge to do large-scale, inefficient research and focus much more intently on beating every insight we can out of existing information and cost-effectively conducting parsimonious marketing research projects where, once again, we squeeze every insight we can for the research purpose at hand, as well as disseminate this information to our colleagues and use it to constitute a knowledge base that can be drawn upon later for different purposes. Only by taking this efficient approach will we be able to obtain and update the level of understanding of our customers, our opportunities, our obstacles, etc., that is increasingly requisite in these challenging times. 
Richard B. Vanderveer, Ph.D. CEO, GfK Healthcare 
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