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.
The Marketing Research function in a multinational pharmaceutical company really divides itself into two major sectors: 1. Studies of local markets, which must be conducted in each individual country. 2. Studies of world trends, which must be carried out by a central Marketing Research Department. In our experience, these two functions are complementary.
This study sets out to define some of the major differences between general practitioners, consultants and hospital doctors - differences in work load, environment, and level of medicine practised. Their approach to product selection is examined, and the way in which these differences can be utilised in the tailoring of promotional approach is discussed. A study of current approaches used is presented which indicates that in few instances are promotional approaches tailored to the audience needs.
This study deals with doctors perceptions, images, attitudes, behaviour and usage habits as they are related to the subject of "Imported vs. Local Drugs". The study was conducted on a personal interview basis with a sample of 400 regular practitioners, randomly selected from the total doctor population in Israel. The subject areas included in this study were: A. Awareness of attitude towards Israeli made drugs vis a vis imported ones (towards the industry as a whole, separate companies and also separate marketing problems); B. How doctors see themselves professionally; C. Exposure and attitudes towards advertising and promotional mix; D. Professional & demographic background.
Since this conference is concerned with doctor typology, the emphasis of the paper will be in terms of describing, using one particular case-history as a vehicle, the concepts behind the use of one specific technique (or rather 'duo' of techniques) for typology - namely factor and cluster analyses. From a practical point of view, however, the typology aspect was only a part - and in fact by no means the major part - of a much broader study, namely: A. Determining the criteria important from the General Practitioners' point of view in the evaluation of the branded products; B. Evaluating how the existing products fare with respect to these criteria; C. Exploring the possibility of developing a new product specifically to fulfil the requirements derived.
I shall try and start by illustrating some of the internal pressures among our marketing staff; which led to the decision to use data processing and the computer for analysis of basic information about the group of people who constitute our customers, the prescribing physicians. Every pharmaceutical company is aware of the criticism from both government and public sources that its promotional methods are expensive and not always tailored strictly enough to the needs of the doctors. This particularly concerns direct mailing. We felt, therefore, that if we knew more about the doctors and could organise this information into easily retrievable, accurate and relevant groupings then we would have a marketing tool which would enable us to be selective in our approach to the doctor. This would enable us to focus our mailings on groups of doctors more likely to be interested in their content and thus avoid the charge of using a hammer to kill a fly. There are additional economic benefits of course - mainly costs, as not only fewer stamps and envelopes are needed, but the print order can be tailored to the number of doctors we intend to contact. You may like to see a typical costing we developed showing the saving compared to overall mailing shots.
I would like to comment on a few major points of interest as raised by the papers of the last two days. Firstly marketing models. Segmentation and typology of doctors seem to be of universal interest.
At the beginning, perhaps a few general comments are in order. All of us recognise the end purpose of our efforts in the area of physician typology. It is to identify those segments of the physician population which contain our best customer prospects. In the same process, of course, we are attempting to find means of screening out those physicians who are poorer prospects for prescribing our products. If our search for such criteria is successful, we shall then be able to improve the efficiency of product promotion by focusing in the directions of optimal prescribing potential.
It is not the purpose of this paper to suggest modifications in the existing structure of decisions. Without discussing at this point the role of marketing statistics in a pharmaceutical company we propose suggesting a method of exploiting such statistics as intensively as possible in order to prepare for the major decisions. The very concrete results that we have already obtained appear to ensure that they will be used exhaustively in various forms by companies having different organizations. The basic concept of the method consists in merging together all of a company's data available on a sample of panel doctors. The data covers, first the drug and quantities prescribed by the panel, next the dates of the marketing actions performed on those doctors as recorded in the company's files. By comparing the actions performed on each individual doctor with the results obtained, one gets a measure of the relative effectiveness of past actions, which in turn gives indications on the most profitable actions to be performed during the next phase.
In recent years there has been growing interest among marketing management in the possibilities of using quantitative techniques as aids to decision making. This interest is reaching epidemic proportions in many industries not least the pharmaceutical industry, and considerable confusion about the roles of these models has been generated. My paper describes a quantitative model of a pharmaceutical market and will, I hope, shed some light on the pitfalls of using such techniques as well as the very real benefits which can be derived.