How does pharmaceutical marketing work

But there are fundamental differences between marketing for consumers versus marketing for doctors that every marketer should be aware of. In this article, we will carefully analyze the main differences and similarities between marketing to physicians and direct to consumers. If your job is to market to doctors, then the first half of the article is for you. If your job is to build awareness and sell to consumers, then jump on the second half of the article.

In comparison, the industry grew at the rate of approximate 5. New players are also entering the fray, causing market disruption and increasing competition. Although small pharmaceutical companies and startups are causing a seismic shift in the market, the 10 so-called Big Pharma - namely, Novartis, Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Abbvie, AstraZeneca, F.

Of course, there are myriads of factors that can influence the market size of the pharmaceutical sector. Yes, it does.

And it spends a lot more on marketing to physicians than marketing direct to consumers. Click To Tweet. The same goes for the rest. The only exception was the Hoffmann-La Roche. That leaves pharma companies with a short window of years on the patent to profit from their drugs. These are usually consumers or drug prescribers doctors, clinical officers, and other healthcare professionals. To do so effectively and efficiently, pharma marketers and sales reps need to have a stronger and clearer understanding of the target audience more than ever before.

This way, they are able to better meet the needs of the customers and healthcare decision makers. Marketers have to also convince doctors by talking about the efficacy of the drugs they are marketing.

On the other hand, pharma marketing has its own set of challenges, and marketers are tasked with the responsibility to measure and quantify these hurdles. After all, they have to justify their spending and how they plan to handle these challenges, as well as prove that their efforts contribute to the bottom line of the pharma company.

Pharma marketers and sales representatives are also required to demonstrate the ROI for their marketing spend. They have to showcase that they are spending marketing dollars in a prudent and wise way, so that their executive team can continue funding their activities. Given that they get a huge chunk of money, they also have to collect customer feedback, track market response, and show how they impact on overall brand awareness.

Pharmaceutical drugs are highly regulated and complex products, which makes the job of pharma marketers far much more complicated and harder. No matter the case, they have to use either direct or indirect marketing to inspire a purchase. Direct marketing methods used by pharma marketers include:. This is especially true for little-known or new pharmaceutical products. Several studies have shown that offering free drug samples to clinicians can increase the prescription of a given medication.

It promotes loyalty and provides an avenue for efficacy-testing. Physician detailing. This approach to pharma marketing entails one-on-one selling or promoting of a pharmaceutical drug to pharmacy managers and clinicians. In this approach, the pharma rep usually visits the physician to pitch their pharmaceutical products. Technically, detailing also involves providing gifts to doctors such as stationery, medical textbooks or even taking them out for lunches. Giving out drug coupons.

This strategy is designed to help market drugs directly to consumers. Marketers can give out coupons, discount codes, and other deals online or offline, particularly through pharmacies. Promotional mailing. This is a method that has been used by pharmaceutical marketers for decades now. Advertising via web and medical journals.

Medical publications and healthcare-related websites receive significant traffic from the medical community. By running ads in these authoritative publications, marketers can win the attention of doctors and eventually sell them on the efficacy of their pharmaceutical products. Journal ads deliver the best ROI for pharma marketing. Direct-to-consumer marketing.

This approach has proven to be quite effective, especially when it comes to encouraging consumers to inquire about brand drugs even when generic alternatives exist. Providing clinicians with continuing medical education CME. Marketers can help bring on board physicians and care teams to pharma-sponsored continuing medical education courses that will help teach them about the promoted drugs.

Regulated by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education, these courses are great for pharma marketing. HAOs mobile the public and masses on the benefits of a certain drug or sensitize them on a specific medical issue. By giving grants to HAOs, pharma marketers can get their products in the front burner through validation.

For pharma marketers, however, this can be quite tricky because they have a choice of two potential audiences: doctors and patients.

Sometimes, the patient is the end consumer, and sometimes the sole decision maker for example when it comes to generic drugs. On the other hand, the doctor is usually the prescriber of the medication, which means the decision to purchase certain pharmaceutical products rests in their lap.

Marketing to patients is different in various ways from marketing to doctors. Even more challenging is the fact that patients are now more empowered than ever before.

In fact, more than 77 percent of consumers now turn to search engines like Google to learn about drugs treating a specific condition. As a pharma marketer trying to market to healthcare professionals, the odds are heavily stacked against you. Doctors are incredibly hard to find.

For the little spare time they have, doctors have no room for small talk or boring product pitches. The competition is cut-throat. Over 81, pharma reps in the US are trying to market to physicians. At the end of the day, doctors get lots of samples, heaps of medical journals, and their mailboxes are bursting at the seams with mailings from marketers.

To make matters worse, every doctor has at least two persons hired especially to keep marketers from interruption care delivery. Doctors are smart people, and they know it. They have no ears for fluffy pitches; they just want facts, hard numbers, and rationalized marketing.

What doctors do is uber important. They save lives, make life-changing diagnosis, and their job is ever-stressful. This presents another big challenge for pharma marketers. Most marketing approaches to doctors have become cliche. Just look around. Medical journals, web ads, TV spots, and other marketing directed at physicians all look and feel more or less the same. What will make you stand out?

Yes, marketing to doctors might feel like climbing Mt. Here are some tried and true tips you need to add to your pharma marketing playbook. Right from the get go, marketing to physicians should be strategic, tactical, and razor-focused.

Remember that not all doctors are created equal. Social marketing has been successful in delivering public health behavior changes for many years. It is an effective tool in understanding the methods for delivering information in a way that induces behavioral change. For pharmaceutical companies, this means taking a holistic view of how to market medicine. They can no longer focus solely on the positive or negative health impacts of taking a drug.

Instead, they need to delve more deeply into the social, cultural, economic, and ethical impacts of their medicine, and use these insights to personalize their approach to consumers. The ease of information flow can open up a whole new set of opportunities in marketing.

The shift in types of interactions such as virtual care, patient portals, and other online resources can allow pharmaceutical companies to derive value by building advanced digital marketing and engagement capabilities similar to companies in other consumer goods industries. As mentioned above, the regulations for this industry are only becoming tougher as the scrutiny on personal data privacy increases.

This will be the biggest obstacle for pharmaceutical companies to overcome in the future. Meanwhile, technological companies such as Google, Apple, and Facebook are still able to collect personally identifiable data and present personalized advertisements.

Therefore, an industry with a vast experience in collecting personal information such as the pharmaceutical industry needs to leverage the knowledge and expertise in other industries to ensure that protecting consumer data remains a priority. In order for pharmaceutical companies to continue thriving, they need to engage with patients, who are becoming more aware of their health and are more focused on holistic health outcomes.

This means expanding their offerings and capabilities to beyond drugs with a focus on continuous patient outcomes, using behavioral insights to drive how they market specific drugs, and using the appropriate channels to deliver the right information. In just a few years, the early health tech-adopting pharma companies may have earned the right to sit beside consumers in their homes. Sen A, Siebert H. Markets and the Freedom to Choose.

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Of principles and pens: attitudes and practices of medicine house staff toward pharmaceutical industry promotions. Pharmaceutical industry has been the most profitable industry in the country for a decade.

According to an analysis of data, it was five times as profitable as the average Fortune companies. The industry deserves great credit for supplying miracle drugs, but no responsible industry would engage in the price gouging and advertising abuses that taint its reputation today This sharp growth has produced many concerns regarding marketing tactics because when we compare this growth with the launching of new molecules, we will find no considerable addition in number of new molecules so easily.

Hence it can be concluded that this growth is based upon generic drugs. Same drug is registered with different brand names, for example, diclofenac sodium is registered in Pakistan with more then brand names for different companies This type of growth is increasing with no ending of competition in the market.

Companies want to sale their products by any possible means either ethical or not. The Food and Drug Administration FDA approved Neurontin in doses of mg per day as adjunctive therapy for partial complex seizures, in which was patented in Later Neurontin faced generic competition and lost most U.

Drug Information Misinterpretation And Manipulation It is accepted and well documented fact that pharmaceutical companies are the biggest source of drug information for the prescribers. If pharmaceutical industry provide healthcare professionals with exact and accurate information to the doctors regarding medicine, it will be really a very big contribution for the healthcare system and in large for the society because doctors are very much dependent on the pharmaceutical companies for drug information especially in developing countries 9.

Using the fact of being main source of drug information, companies are not hesitant even to deceive the health care providers and regulatory authorities 30 , Many studies have proved provision of drug information with the intentional manipulation and misinterpretation. In , for example, a study comparing the effects of brand-name and generic formulations of levothyroxine led to an uproar over the discovery that the manufacturer of the brand-name product suppressed publication of the result that the two formulations were equivalent.

Recently, lawsuits alleging damages from illegal marketing of another old drug, gabapentin Neurontin , have yielded remarkable discoveries about the structure and function of pharmaceutical marketing This is the picture of a developed country, where peer-reviewed journals are the biggest source of information for doctors regarding drugs followed by medical representatives as second biggest source for them 29 , but in developing countries situation is different.

There is poor or no mechanism of monitoring drug promotion, medical representatives are the main source of information 32 even we can say the only source of drug information for 33 the doctors regarding drugs and to transfer the drug information 32 , brochures are the main tool. More then seventy-seven percent of the doctors rely on the medical representatives for drug information 32 in developing countries.

According to IMS health, the sales force of top 30 US based pharmaceutical companies was in which increased to more then only in 7 years It is not only in developing countries, if we observe the pharmaceutical industry is heavily involved in aggressive drug promotion and due to this aggressiveness many cases of unfair ways of drug promotion have been identified in developed countries and plead. Bribes Any researcher, investigated the comparative evidence on bribery in international trade has concluded that pharmaceutical is one of the most corrupt among the industries.

There is evidence of bribe being paid to every type of governmental official who could conceivably affect the interest of pharmaceutical companies: bribes to cabinet members to get drugs approval for marketing, bribes to social security bureaucrats who fix prices for subsidized drugs; to health inspectors who check pharmaceutical manufacturing plants; to customs officials, hospital administrators, tax assessors, political parties and others A practicing physician shared his experience saying that companies sponsored lectures by specialists for family doctors were interesting and informative bit with only a reference to a company product.

Specialists are becoming little more than paid 'shill' for pharmaceutical companies'. Usually the slides they use for their lectures are provided by the host pharmaceutical company. Topics for these lectures are just repetition. Their research figures are manipulated to turn a two percent improvement into a fifty percent improvement.

Graphs are doctored by altering the scales to show substantial improvements where none exist If the drug company didn't expect the gift to influence the doctor's decision, why would it give the gift? It is now beyond dispute that retiring Rep. Companies offer everything from free golf games to week-ends in resort hotels, from free tickets for theatre festivals to dinner cruises.

The evening invitations to the most expensive local restaurants arrive once or twice a week, let alone the free lunches which are mine for the asking. The most a guest have is to do is to sit through a half hour presentation of a company's product Abuse of Sponsorships Companies also try to make direct payments to the doctors by various indirect ways i.

Enter patients in clinical trials against payment, National and International conferences and symposia sponsorships, free medical camps, and foreign trips. The internet is helping to globalize and to change the nature of pharmaceutical marketing, and thus raises some new challenges for regulators There are no restrictions for consumers to access the web based drug information or through the advertisement mails they get in their e-mail box from some unknown person offering to deliver at there doors.

Now the question arises who will monitor them how it can be controlled and after the start of internet based pharma marketing, country regulation has became just a piece of paper because direct to consumers advertisement of prescription drugs is legally allowed on in USA and New Zealand but by internet who will stop the companies to direct their advertisements towards consumers and who will stop consumers from accessing such advertisements and getting involved in self medication of prescription drugs.

Impact of marketing on prescribing behavior and behavioral changes towards offers A number of authors have commented paucity or lack of objective data on impact of pharmaceutical marketing techniques on physician prescribing practices The industry grew very fastly during the last 2 decades. Simple example for observing this growth rate in a developing country is the trend in number of drugs registration in Pakistan. The number of total registered branded drugs in Pakistan was less then in early s but it was more then in Ministry of health has registered more branded drugs during last 30 years Pharmaceutical companies give gifts to doctors as a part of promoting and marketing their products.

Group of doctors have formed companies and prescribing their products. They have an increasing liaison with chemists to prescribe a product which provides more discounts. They ask for money per prescription particularly for prescribing more tonics and vitamins. Request for renovation of clinics and hospitals Other studies also support the truth; that pharmaceutical promotion has clear impact on the doctors prescribing behavior.

Impact On Healthcare Spending Spending on prescription drugs by different countries is increasing continuously by significant margin every year and one of the identified and most prominent cause of this increase is continuing switch to new drugs 42 which is an out come of increasing promotional influence. Share of the pharmaceutical expenditures over the past decade, reached 10 percent of overall healthcare spending which is highest during last forty years.

Conclusion All the codes of conduct, self regulations and laws developed to control pharmaceutical promotion and marketing seem ineffective which is reflected by increasing marketing expenditure of the companies.

In , it was 9. Thus increasing the need of well define laws to be implemented by regulatory authorities only. There must not be any reliance from industry for their self regulation due to their clear and continuous reflection of pure business mentality i.

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