Leveraging Peer-to-Peer Networks in Pharmaceutical Marketing - Innovation and Marketing in the Pharmaceutical Industry - page 462

the opinion leaders can influence market access by convincing the pharmacy
benefit managers to give a favorable formulary status to the new drug or approve
use of the medical device.
Pharmaceutical firms target physicians based on their potential and responsiveness
to detailing. Typically, pharmaceutical firms target physicians based on their pre-
scription deciles. The high prescribing physicians get higher frequency of sales calls
as compared with the low prescribing physicians. However, as Nair et al. ( 2010 ) and
Iyengar et al. ( 2011 ) find in their research, not all influential physicians are high
prescribers. There are a lot of influential physicians who teach in hospitals, publish
in top academic journals, and participate in clinical trials, acting as key opinion
leaders disseminating information, but themselves do not prescribe too many drugs.
These low prescribers are valuable for sourcing prescriptions from other high
prescribing physicians, rather than their own prescriptions. These physicians have a
high social multiplier. As described earlier, the social multiplier measures the ratio
of the total sales (direct as well as indirect sales) generated by targeting the opinion
leader to the sales from the opinion leader alone (ignoring the change in actions of
their peers). Bhatia and Wang ( 2011 ) find an average social multiplier of 1.27 which
is significantly greater than one. This implies that ignoring the social multiplier
effect would lead to suboptimal resource allocation since sales calls to the opinion
leaders will be undervalued. Hence, knowledge of the social multipliers of opinion
leaders leads to better allocation of scarce marketing and sales force resources, and
leads to better return on investment on sales force even for a drug which is already
in the market.
Lastly, Iyengar et al. point out that it is not just the fact that the opinion leader has
adopted the new drug that influences other physicians, but also the volume of
prescriptions of the new drug prescribed by the opinion leader. Hence, there is an
advantage to targeting the heavy prescribing “market leaders” along with the “clinical
leaders” in order to create the critical mass to reach the tipping point (threshold)
leading to widespread use of the new drug.

15.5 Concluding Thought

There is a strong interest in studying social interactions and social contagion driving
a large stream of research in marketing, as well as economics and sociology, in this
area. This is a promising research area since this research is very nascent and there
is a large opportunity for deeper analysis. I believe we have just scratched the
surface when it comes to understanding the various motivations and dynamics of
peer-to-peer influences, both in terms of the peer group formation, its influence on
decision making, and in terms of who become influential and why. The literature so
far has tried to identify the physician network and to quantify the impact of the
opinion leaders. The next step is to study the formation and utilization of these
networks. We describe six different areas of research which hold great promise for
researchers in this area.