Patient Empowerment: Consequences for Pharmaceutical Marketing and for the Patient–Physician Relationship - Innovation and Marketing in the Pharmaceutical Industry - page 420

Modernization and
Self-Expression

Patient-Physician
Relationship

Demographic and
Lifestyle Changes

Patient
Empowerment

Technological
Evolution

Pharmaceutical
Marketing

Regulatory
Changes

Fig. 14.1 Conceptual overview of the current chapter

of these trends towards patient empowerment and review the consequences of the
patient's new role for the patient-physician relationship and for pharmaceutical
marketing.

14.2 The Rise of Patient Empowerment

The traditional model of medical decision-making is physician-centric, i.e.,
pharmaceutical marketers tend to focus on the physician as their key customer and
promote their therapies through direct-to-physician channels such as detailing and
advertising in medical journals (Amaldoss and He 2009 ). Under this conception,
the business model of large pharmaceutical companies, the so-called blockbuster
approach, entails developing a new therapy, marketing it as the new best-in-class,
and pushing it mainly via direct-to-physician marketing (The Economist 2007 ).
Important topics that inform managerial decisions in this traditional model include
understanding key physician opinion leaders, developing models to segment the
physician population, and optimally allocating detailing and samples (Stremersch
and Van Dyck 2009 ). These may currently be mature areas of managerial and
academic interest, but that does not mean we fully understand therapy consump-
tion and marketing. In fact, this traditional model is nowadays threatened by the
increasing importance of other stakeholders in the decision-making process, like
the payer (e.g., insurance companies, Governments), regulators, and the patient,
which reduces the physician's role in therapy choice as well as the firm's capacity
to influence therapy choice via direct-to-physician marketing.
The tenets of the white-coat model are examined in the work of American soci-
ologist Talcott Parsons, who studied how social systems govern societies. He con-
cluded that, traditionally, patients and physicians were expected to play different
roles in society (Parsons 1951 ). More specifically, patients are granted the status of
sick people in need of care and are allowed and expected to give up some of their
normal activities to actively work towards health restoration by seeking the advice