Marketing research has to develop as a dynamic process if it is to fulfil its major purpose of helping management reach better decisions more quickly. Innovation is disruptive and change demands that researchers provide continuous and up-to-date signals of its pace and its direction. Unstable conditions are those which require most of management decision-making but in these situations the commercial purchase and prescription audits are often divergent and always too late. We found that key components in building a simple, iterative model were a few salient questions related to reasons for product choice. When these were incorporated into the model, it then produced good forecasts even in volatile states and with minimal data. An essential feature of the model is a prescription share index and the mechanism by which this and other variables are put together to provide management with a practical tool of promotional significance is explained.
The research programme which is the subject of this paper started 9 years ago, just before the introduction of a new ethical product into a therapeutic market which was certainly ready for expansion. The programme is still continuing and has entered its most interesting phase now that the product has reached a dominant status in its particular sector. The evolution of the programme has been a deliberately planned process, designed always to anticipate changes in marketing requirements. Much of the earlier work was mainly confined to measuring variations in the structure of the market, to monitoring and predicting the position of our product within it and to unsophisticated enquiries into attitudes. The more recent work has been primarily concerned with the unravelling of more complex determinants of prescribing behaviour in order to reveal ways in which the remaining potential of our product may be realised.