In Memoriam
It was July, and I was taking it easy for a few weeks. Golf, trips to the beach, dinner out and walking the dogs in the humid heat of Hilton Head Island (they don’t call that area of South Carolina the Lowcountry for nothing!) were my daily activities when a colleague forwarded me a few paragraphs that had come across his computer. As you can imagine, like everybody else, I get a ton of e-mails every day, so it takes a lot for one to stop me in my tracks. This one did.
The few paragraphs summarized a press release from PDI, announcing the company’s plans to “exit the marketing research business currently conducted by its business unit, TVG Marketing Research & Consulting, effective August 31, 2010.”
Several things grabbed me about this announcement. First, as many of you know, the TVG name was actually an acronym for The Vanderveer Group, a company I founded in 1979 and that underwent its name change when I departed about a decade later to join Medco in pursuit of using Individual Physician Level Prescribing Data (IPLRx) as a tool for introducing the pharmaceutical industry to the micromarketing paradigm.
More telling was the shock of realization that the company was one of the leaders in the pharmaceutical micromarketing field, although only a fraction of the size of the industry leaders in 2010, including GfK, Kantar, Adelphi, etc. And now it had fallen...
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