This paper describes the development of using Medilink's General Practitioner panel to track attitudes and prescribing intentions over time and using the data derived as a basis for forecasting new product performance. Medilink's 'on-line', interactive, self-completion market research panel of GPs was set up as a national panel in early 1984. The issue of the Government's Limited List proposals provided a platform to demonstrate the value of the Medilink panel in terms of a large sample providing users with 'fast-feedback' of results on a regular survey basis - an ideal research vehicle to track changing attitudes. The first six months of a new product's life is critical in determining its future success - fast feedback is vital for the ethical pharmaceutical manufacturer. For this paper a new product launch was tracked on AGB Medilink. This launch was one of the first major new products to be monitored on a monthly basis by Medilink, for this paper we have examined, and compared the results to IMS, the results of a years Medilink data. Particular attention was paid to aware prescribers and non-prescribers future prescribing intention and their subsequent prescribing behaviour. A relationship was found and a means of forecasting future performance examined. Today's new product monitoring on Medilink includes, as well as products, selected patient data thus providing the essential ingredients for any model to be used to forecast future new product performance.
The purpose of this paper is to give a historical review of food assortment trends, especially in the last fifteen years. The current situation is that the consumer can choose between more and more "new" variants in the different product groups. This makes it more difficult to know if she (or he) is really buying the "right" product. Once she has found the most suitable variant, she discovers that she has to visit a shop other than her "permanent" one to buy it next time.
This paper questions the concept of product life-cycle, and makes the point that in both theoretical and practical marketing it has often been used as an excuse for non-action. The analogy with human life has only served to reinforce it as a valid theory. The author calls for a new definition of the life-cycle concept, in socio-cultural terms. In this sense, a product begins its decline because it is unable to keep up with the process of social change affecting its consumers in the market. It becomes culturally obsolete. Editorial products are by their nature more in tune with the social environment and because of this they are easier to modify than industrial products. Case histories are presented, showing how this type of marketing operation was successfully carried out on two women's magazines of the Rizzoli Publishing Group in Italy using data from Demoskopea's Social Monitor.
This paper questions the concept of product life-cycle, and makes the point that in both theoretical and practical marketing it has often been used as an excuse for non-action. The analogy with human life has only served to reinforce it as a valid theory. The author calls for a new definition of the life-cycle concept, in socio-cultural terms. In this sense, a product begins its decline because it is unable to keep up with the process of social change affecting its consumers in the market. It becomes culturally obsolete. Editorial products are by their nature more in tune with the social environment and because of this they are easier to modify than industrial products. Case histories are presented, showing how this type of marketing operation was successfully carried out on two women's magazines of the Rizzoli Publishing Group in Italy using data from Demoskopea's Social Monitor.
Product testing has been a relatively neglected area in the literature of market research. This paper reviews current thinking and practice, discusses some major methodological issues and indicates some areas for further investigation. The first section looks at the basic assumptions of product testing methodology, including the nature of the respondent's task and the relationship between discrimination and preference. The second section uses the product life cycle analogy in considering the varied roles of product testing in the decision processes of marketing. Finally, the paper discusses a number of problem areas in product testing, presenting evidence for certain preferred methods and, in other cases, demonstrating the need to relate technique to marketing problem or product field.
The market research profession can fill the gap by taking the attitude that it is in the information business , rather than in the research business . That, in other words, the market researcher seeks to fill industry's need for information as the most important raw material for its decisions, rather than to sell the output of its own research machinery.
This paper is meant to be a discussion paper and a contribution to a more systematic approach to what is called "industrial marketing research" . This approach will be two-pronged, i. e. the product flow from the top to the bottom of the product pyramid and the product flow in a manufacturing process from conception to marketing. It is felt that in this way the research contribution to management thinking can be more clearly defined as also the contribution of research methods to the solution of research problems.