This paper reviews the effect of enhancing the value of a pharmaceutical panel by offering the monthly data as both printed reports and through an on-line database service. The panel, JIGSAW, has been running for some 24 months in the UK, based upon a panel of 400 doctors monitoring the use of prescriptions in 5 therapeutic areas. The data is collected by ISIS and then handed over to QUANTIME for data-editing, analysis and for incorporation into an on-line database for access through the interactive package - QUANVERT.
This paper suggests that pricing decision-making should encompass the attitudes and prescribing motivations of doctors - not merely towards our projected marketing platform in the context of directly competitive pricing but also in the macro sense that some prescribers will, of their nature, be more likely to use the drug at a certain price level. Doctors can be classified on the dimension of product price and can be assessed for potential market share accordingly. The paper calls upon a large data-base to study in detail the prescribing dynamics of U.K. general practitioners in a major therapy area and correlates armamentarium to attitudes and known demographics. It concludes that certain demographic variables may powerfully assist the process of deploying marketing effort and sophisticated models may be developed which may assist the pricing decision and which may equally quantify the impact on market share of an adopted pricing policy.
In the U.K. retail antibacterial market, Amoxil is brand leader. However, share varies considerably in market sub-segments as does the source of competition. The Market Research Department is a prime contributor to competitor analysis, all the more so in such a familiar therapy area where depth of understanding is already considerable, and the ways in which its functions are performed are discussed in this paper, with the intention of providing a "case study" of one particular set of circumstances. As the industry already has most of the data and the techniques necessary to perform this role in an efficient manner, the most important watchword for ongoing competitor analysis is: Selectivity.