The Successful Launch and Diffusion of New Therapies - Innovation and Marketing in the Pharmaceutical Industry - page 190

innovations are launched first in the USA or in even in the domestic market of the
manufacturing firm. We review these considerations in step 3.

This review is based on an exhaustive search across major scholarly journals in
marketing, economics, and health.

7.1 Step 1: Assessing the Potential of a New Treatment

Marketing scientists have developed several methods to assess the potential of new
treatments. Broadly, we can discern six different methodological frameworks to
evaluate the commercial potential of new treatments (for an overview of the main
characteristics of each framework, see Table 7.1 ). These frameworks can be divided
into two main categories, distinguished according to the level at which they study
the acceptance of a new treatment. Models in the first category, comprising diffu-
sion models and sales models, study new product acceptance at the level of a group
of people (region, segment, total market), whereas the models in the second

Table 7.1 Methodological frameworks for assessing new treatments' commercial potential
Dependent variable Level of model Type of data

Aggregate - level models
Diffusion
models

Number of adopters
of the new drug
(cumulative
across time
periods)

Across groups of
physicians

Observed behavior in panels
across time (e.g., IMS
Health physician panel)
or stated behavior
gathered from surveys or
interviews (e.g., the
Coleman et al. 1966
Medical Innovation
study)

Sales models Amount of active

ingredient of the
new drug sold
(per time period)

Across groups of
physicians or
pharmacies

Observed behavior (e.g.,
IMS Health pharmacy
audits)

Disaggregate - level models
Prescription
count models

Number of new or
total prescriptions
written

Physician-level Observed behavior (e.g.,

IMS Health physician
panel)

Learning models Utility of the new

drug (choice
likelihood)

Physician-level/
Physician-patient-
level

Observed behavior (e.g., the
IPCI panel of Erasmus
MC)

Consideration
and choice
models

Utility of the new
drug (choice
likelihood)

Physician-patient-
level

Observed behavior (e.g.,
IMS Health physician
panel)

Conjoint
analysis

Utility of the new
drug (choice
likelihood or
preference)

Physician- or
physician-patient
level

Stated preference (e.g.,
experimental conditions
imposed on a sample of
physicians)