Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
product category demand level: some studies report that DTCA is the main category
expansion driver, but most studies report that detailing is also the most important
instrument at the category demand level. More research into this issue is needed.
We also conclude that the effectiveness of pharmaceutical promotion differs
across therapeutic categories. This might be due to different saturation levels
(Vakratsas and Kolsarici
2008
) or perhaps by different degrees of diagnosis uncer-
tainty across therapeutic categories. Fischer and Albers (
2010
) provide yet another
explanation: they fi nd that effectiveness of detailing and journal advertising is
higher in chronic care categories than in acute care categories.
The studies in this chapter suggest several other moderating variables such as
country effects, order of entry effects, and model characteristics. However, Kremer
et al. (
2008
) do not fi nd signifi cant effects for most of these variables, with the
notable exception that models which account for endogeneity in promotional expen-
ditures fi nd signifi cantly lower estimates of promotional effectiveness.
In Sect.
20.3
we focused on some important studies that investigate how market-
ing variables affect the diffusion process. The general conclusion is that “own”
detailing and other “own” marketing variables such as medical journal advertising
and physician meetings speed up the diffusion process, but there is little consensus
on how this occurs. We provide an overview of the different approaches for includ-
ing marketing variables in the published diffusion models and conclude that it is not
clear which provides the best representation of reality. More research into this issue
is needed.
In Sect.
20.4
we considered three questions. First, we described how marketing
effectiveness is related to the category life cycle, and concluded that pioneering
brands have the highest marketing effectiveness, whereas brands that enter during
the growth stage of a category have highest response to perceived product quality.
Secondly, we focused on the effectiveness of different instruments over the brand's
life cycle and found that the effectiveness of instruments that are aimed at the physi-
cian declines over the brand's life cycle. For DTCA we conclude that category
advertisements may be more effective when patients are not yet fully educated
about the disease that is treated by a drug. Once the patients are educated brand
advertisements have higher effectiveness. Thirdly, we investigated how marketing
affects category sales when competition in a category increases. The fi nding is that
detailing may have the largest effect on category sales, but that due to intense com-
petition individual brand efforts completely cancel each other out.
We conclude that the review of the research presented in this chapter leaves sev-
eral questions unanswered about the effectiveness of pharmaceutical marketing and
that these provide interesting topics for further research. Besides the unanswered
questions of today it is of great interest to identify the questions of tomorrow.
We conclude this chapter with a discussion of three themes that we expect to pro-
vide the most fruitful future areas of research.
1. Research on pharmaceutical demand in developing countries.
2. Research on regulatory changes.
3. Research on the role of the internet channel in the pharmaceutical market.
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