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GfK Healthcare | November 2010 | |
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Books Old and New – Remembrances and Insights  I spend much of my time now studying, not just reading, books I think might be relevant to the pharmaceutical industry and channeling my learnings in the form of industry presentations, discussions and articles. In fact, I have become obsessed with the notion that someone has to wring every ounce of meaning out of these seminal works, since they are available at little or no cost and can sometimes provide better general insights than marketing research. I don’t throw the word seminal around lightly. In order to be rated as seminal, a book has to change, fundamentally, the way I view an issue or introduce me to issues I haven’t thought about before. As you know, I pride myself on sharing with you almost exclusively recent seminal books, since in this rapidly changing world even the most profound wisdom often has a limited shelf life. If it was published in the last year, has been identified for me as potentially useful, and especially if it is available “e” for reading on my iPad, I will be all over it. Usually, a quick skim will reveal the extent to which the book is worthy of in-depth study. Recently, however, my entire business library passed through my hands as I emptied my office shelves and transported books and magazines to my home study in Philadelphia where, in concert with writing in space that overlooks the lagoon at my place on Hilton Head Island, I will be producing Vanderveer’s Views in the future. I must tell you, it was an interesting tour down memory lane. First to come into my hands was Mickey Smith’s classic book Pharmaceutical Marketing. When I began my career in pharmaceutical marketing research some four decades ago, this book was my entire library. At that point, I was sufficiently narrow-minded to believe that no book without a title this spot on could be relevant to my work. As I thumbed through the book, I realized how much had changed in the health care marketplace since the book was written. Expanding my consciousness somewhat beyond this parochial perspective, farther down the shelf I encountered the Churchill Marketing Research text I used to develop the seminar I taught once a quarter for many years to a “sellout” crowd of 25 or so students sent to be slide-beaten (yes, we were still using overhead slides then) by me for three and a half days in Philadelphia. TVG, for which as founder and president I ran the seminars, is now defunct, as is much of the training business in pharmaceutical marketing research. It occurred to me as I packed the Churchill volume that apparently people are now too busy starting to do projects in the early days of their marketing research careers to spend much time in formal training. Next to pop into my hands was Rapp and Collins’ The Great Marketing Turnaround... This book was genuinely seminal in that it introduced me to micromarketing, as practiced in consumer marketing, at exactly the same time I was forming a joint venture with the Medical Marketing Group, an arm of the pharmacy benefits manager Medco. My job was to teach the industry how to best utilize the Individual Physician Level Prescribing Data (later to be marketed by IMS under the Exponent banner) that had recently been introduced. Using these data not only to evaluate the prescribing productivity of doctors, but also as proxies for their prescribing habits and styles, seemed to me to be their best application, and thus my joint venture with MMG, Physician Micromarketing Inc., was born. Seth Godin’s Permission Marketing was the next tome to receive extended focus. This seminal book put me on notice that just because you are shouting features and benefits at a prospect or client doesn’t mean that he/she is listening. It changed forever my view of the pharmaceutical marketing process, where reach and frequency reigned supreme and developing long- term permission to communicate meaningfully with customers was often ignored and has yet to be fully embraced by many health care marketers who continue to shout nonetheless. Glimmer, an important volume by Warren Berger that presents the thinking and works of designer Bruce Mau, turned my attention to the future. It was the first book (but far from the last) about design that I had ever read and it provided me the key to the toolbox we must assemble to develop the new health care marketing paradigm. Many other books went through my hands, such as Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, which explains how an expert’s intuition can often trump tons of data, and the same author’s The Tipping Point which shows how most processes interesting to us may change gradually up to a point and then accelerate as critical mass is reached. Both books made me think of the transitions I am witnessing in health care and health care marketing research, where slow change is giving way to rapid change as our own tipping point is reached, and where intuition and inspiration will be important forces shaping the new paradigm. Packing Christensen’s The Innovator’s Prescription, however, reminded me of the author’s conclusion that health care as currently practiced in the United States – a hodgepodge built up over time – is totally broken and in great need of being fundamentally rethought. Here, I was reminded, there is still a lot of work to do. Finally, as I packed my stack of periodicals, I found at its top the September 2010 issue of PharmaVOICE. Without a doubt one of the few issues of any industry publication I would describe as seminal, the pages make it crystal clear that under pressure from federal government mandate and other sources, Comparative Effectiveness Research is going to become a, if not the, major driving force in pharmaceutical marketing and marketing research of the future. Just as the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence has required in England and in Europe more generally, we will increasingly need to focus not just on demonstrating and communicating the efficacy and safety of the products we are selling, but on clinical trials and costing models that demonstrate they are better, i.e., more efficient, therapy than what is currently available. In this world, access/reimbursement trump market share as the bar that needs to be cleared. In summary, this packing and unpacking of books gave me the opportunity to revisit some old friends, and to view them through new eyes. While some of their perspectives are dated, others remain as important today as the day they were written. Thus, as I strive in future articles and presentations to keep you up to speed on the latest and greatest, it will now be, more than ever, an effort firmly grounded in seminal learnings from the past.  Richard B. Vanderveer, Ph.D. Strategic Advisor, GfK Healthcare   |