PHARMACEUTICAL MARKETING

Marketing of Pharmaceuticals/Medication/ drugs has a long history, Many countries have measures in place to limit advertising by pharmaceutical companies. Marketing practices can negatively affect both patients and the health care professionals.

Heading of miracle cure with very little potency, is common, genuine non-prescription medications, such as pain relievers or allergy medicine, has now grown to mass marketing of prescription medications which earlier rare, until recently, however. Largely accepted, that since doctors made the selection of drugs, mass marketing was a waste of resources; specific ads targeting the medical profession were thought to be cheaper and just as effective. Sources like ads in professional journals and visits by Medical representatives to doctor’s offices and hospitals. More importantly bringing the upcoming to medical student plays an important part of these efforts.

Pharmaceutical companies are developing processes to influence the people who influence the physicians. There are several channels by which a physician may be influenced, including self-influence through research, peer influence, direct interaction with pharmaceutical companies, patients, and public or private insurance companies. There are also web based instruments that can be used to determine the influencers and buying motives of physicians.

There are a number of firms that specialize in data and analytics for pharmaceutical marketing.

Information source of physicians are, Pharmaceutical information sources as the Physician's Desk Reference and online sources such as PDR.net, as well as via PDAs with applications.

They also rely upon pharmaceutical-branded e-detailing sites, pharmaceutical sales and non-sales representatives, and scholarly literature. Scholarly literature can be in the form of medical journal article reprints, often delivered by sales representatives at their place of employment or at conference exhibitions.

Large size of the sales of Pharmaceutical, the organization, management and effective measurement of the sales force is significant business challenges. Task is broken in to areas like training programs for physicians, force size and structure for sales optimization, call planning and effective sales force. Few Pharmaceutical companies have realized importance of training sales representative on high science alone is not enough especially when most of the products are similar in quality. Thus, now sales representative are trained on relationship selling techniques in addition to medical science and product knowledge, which makes a difference in efficient selling. Especially physicians rely on more and more on specialty sales representation for product information, as they are knowledgeable then primary care representatives.

Physicians are the most important players in pharmaceutical sales. They write the prescriptions that determine which drugs will be used by the patient. Influencing the physician is the key to pharmaceutical Marketing. This is done by a large sales force of representatives explaining benefits, free drug samples, however economic pressures on the industry is causing pharmaceutical companies to rethink the traditional means and sales process to physicians. Due to malpractice, done by large scale companies, physician network associations have adopted new guidelines prohibiting physicians and researchers from accepting gifts from pharmaceutical manufactures. Individual drug samples, left by companies will be distributed through a centralized system, while educational programs, fellowship are now required to be done centrally reviewed and approved.


PHYSICIAN TARGETING

Identification of physician most likely to prescribe a given drug is measured by the number of total prescriptions and new prescriptions per week that the physician writes. This information is collected by commercial vendors. The physicians are then “marked" into groups based on their writing patterns. Higher marked are more aggressively targeted. Pharmaceutical companies use additional information such as:

 Prescription Profitability (script),
 Accessibility of the physician,
 Tendency of the physician to use the pharmaceutical company's drugs,
 Effect of managed care formularies on the ability of the physician to prescribe a drug,
 How readily the physician adopts new drugs in place of older, established treatments.
 The tendency of the physician to use a wide palette of drugs
 Influence that physician have on their colleagues.

Hospital prescribed drugs data are not usually available at the physician level, for such analysis, advanced analytic techniques are used to value physicians in the hospital and their sitting. Advanced analysis would chiefly include leadership of the physician, and how much influence does he keeps, among the

Since 1970’s marketing direct to patient has become important. Many patients will inquire or even demand to receive a medication seen or advertised on television.

SALES FORCE SIZE AND STRUCTURE
Companies must decide appropriate size of their sales force needed to sell a particular assortment of drugs to the target region or territory. How many physicians to see? How often to see them? Decide how many representatives to depute to office and group practice and how many to depute to hospital accounts. Customers are divided into different classes; each class is differentiated by their prescription behavior and of course, their business potential.

Public and private insurers affect the writing of prescriptions by physicians through formularies that restrict the number and types of drugs that the insurer will cover. Not only can the insurer affect drug sales by including or excluding a particular drug from a formulary, they can affect sales by tiring, or placing bureaucratic hurdles to prescribing certain drugs.

PHARMACEUTICAL MARKETING AND ADAPTED CONCEPT

We all know that drugs affect the alter health. By their very nature they play a prominent roll in society. The Medicine/drug industry consequently also plays a important role. Chiefly the roll of marketing medicines / drugs rely on :
1. Discovery and development of New drugs/medicines.
2. Rapid and safe development of medicines/drugs in to useful therapeutic tools and
3. Production and Distribution of safe and efficient existing medicines/drugs

The efforts of marketing practitioners to match as closely as possible the marketing mix of their companies with the needs of the consumer has let to the development of a way to thinking known as the marketing concept. The marketing concept states that what seems obvious now, but was not always practiced, that is easier to change the products and activities of the individual manufacturer to fit the market than it is to convince the entire market to use the products and services as the individual marketer prefers them. The marketing concept further requires that all of the resources of the firm to be organized in to a total system aimed at meeting the needs of the customer. Those firms which once prided themselves on their production expertise now find that marketing know how is perhaps more important.

Marketing plays a key role, in directing activities from the manufacture to the patient. And the patient, it should be noted, stands at the peak of the marketing Pyramid. It is characteristics of a patient which determine which goods will be sold or, more correctly which goods are to be produced. Any firm thus strive to direct marketing activities so the right product is sold in right quantity at the right place at right price at the right time.

Marketing Succeeds in basic task, defined to include right product, quantity, place, price and time, it is still theoretically possible for the product to fail a marketable item. The area of failure could be described broadly as communication. The amount of information that must be communicated by the manufacturer is the availability of a product. One does not buy a product that does not exist. The physician is engaged in astounding search, i.e. with knowledge of the needs of patient, he search the characteristics of available products for the patient, for that which most closely approximates the answer to the patient’s problem. The Physician is engaged in this relatively active and educates search process there is a strong possibility that he will not become aware of a given product unless someone has made a formal effort to communicate to him its availability.

PLANNING AS A CONCEPT

If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there. Whoever the expression is without marketing mind concept. The Marketing Planning system is designed to help produce dynamic line management tool, not a fat document conceived in an ivory tower, to which no one pays any attention. A market plan is incomplete without hard figures, but figures alone do not make a plan.

Marketing plant is a clear statement of the goals/objectives, the strategy for achieving the objectives and a plan that demonstrates how the strategy will be implemented, also, at the outset, a summary of the business situation as we see it, highlighting the issues. This provides the context for strategy for the reader. It also serves as a useful reminder to the plan of the issues which are supporting the strategic choice. If the issues change, inevitably the strategy and/or implementation plan will also need to be adjusted.

A decision make today about allocating resources is dependent up on an interpretation of a known set of variables covering some of the existing potential futures. Viz.
Customers
Producers
Price
Costs
Production
Technology
Distribution
Competition
Regulations

Managers must have an awareness of these variables, even if they do not have complete information. However, today’s known variables become tomorrow’s unknown, and the only thing certain about tomorrow is that it will be different from today. Thus, the marketing planning process must also consider the possible shape and nature of these variables in the future. This is generally sufficient to make good decisions about the optimal allocation of resources to generate today’s business and make as equally competitive tomorrow’s business.

A Good plan:
- Help in identify and develop the new skills and procedures that will be required in the future the skills and procedures that managers have developed to deal with today’s decisions are rarely adequate for marketing decisions about tomorrow.
- Prepare the company for change so that it can take a commanding lead over those companies that merely react, as business inevitably change, so marketing planning helps the transition from today to tomorrow to be smooth and predictable. Planning for changed circumstances provides the single opportunity to gain significant advantage over the competition. Regulatory requirements, product innovation, new technology, standardized distributing and other relatives all combine to even not companies. Yet, the same factors which account for market changes also provide great opportunities.
- Provide a vehicle for communicating the changes and their effects in an open and non-threatening manner. A common belief is that people resist change only when they are uncertain of the personal effect. When change is shown to be beneficial, it tends to be supported.
- Calculate and reduce the available options to achieve the best chance of success and the least chance of error. There is a little choice when allocating today’s resources and thus, little room for error.
- Provide a method for handling complexity: more often then not a pharmaceutical company serves several markets. There are several groups of people who use or buy each product. Each group of people is subject to change, both in varying direction at different rates. One way of dealing is reacting when forced to, ignoring the complexity and taking the least possible action. It is through evaluating each market, establishing the nature of the changes and deciding on profit potential, that resources can be allocated. Thus, the strategy can be the same, but the local market objectives and how that strategy should be implemented will probably always be different.
- Identify the roll of each department and offers the means to co-ordinate their activities, as with changing markets. Company has national and international markets may have many departments to cater for some activity that meets the needs of these markets. If all these departments are not coordinated and heading in the same directions.
- Ensure that the company is proactive in its approach to acquiring the capabilities in needs, as a company develops, so each of the department evolves, this leads to increase demand upon the resources of time and money. If reactive decisions are made, the resulting demands for plant, equipment, R & D, people, finance, even products, exceed the company’s ability to supply. Result, growth becomes disorderly and wasteful, competitive advantage is forfeited and profits delayed or lost.

Conclusion, of marketing planning is to ensure an orderly and profitable transition from today to the future. If as a manager, you enjoy letting things happen, if things are good enough as they are, or if you like to panic decisions, then marketing planning has no value. If you want to understand control your growth, improve your profits or increase the chances of your company’s survival, then marketing planning is not an option, it is mandatory. Planning is not something apart from the rest of the business. To be successful, it must determine activities and be recognized for what it is by the whole company.

Article By:
Piyush Tripathi
Cell: +91-9824663306