Abstract:

Pricing research should help companies to calculate the optimum price for each of their products, in order for companies to achieve their basic goal: Profitability. Pricing research however often fails to do this. Indeed, despite the large number of price-testing techniques available, currently popular techniques do not provide valid answers to questions which are of interest to marketing departments. This is especially TRUE of the pharmaceutical industry. Furthermore, researchers tend to carry out pricing research on the premise of wrong assumptions regarding the targeted market. Consequently the quality and validity of the results obtained are often questionable, therefore potentially damaging to the company, especially in the pharmaceutical field where profit margins are all too often restricted by uncontrollable factors.