Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
marketing instruments. Here it is important to realize that the increasing infl uence
of parties other than the physician on the prescription decision will lead to an
increase in the use of marketing instruments aimed at these parties. Future studies
should focus on multiple players in the chain and answer questions of how they
affect pharmaceutical demand and how they should be approached by marketing
efforts. One particularly notable, and currently under-researched, party is the phar-
macist. The pharmacist is the last professional in the pharmaceutical channel and
increasingly responsible for drug choice. For example, the decision to dispense a
generic instead of a branded drug is made mostly at the pharmacist level. Future
research should pay attention to the pharmacist's new role due to regulatory changes
and assess the effects of this shift in responsibilities on category- and brand level
demand and new product diffusion.
Ad
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Research on the role of the internet channel in the pharmaceutical market.
Facilitated by the internet, the role of the patient is changing. Patients now have bet-
ter access to prescription guidelines, co-payments, and alternative therapies. They
also communicate with each other and with pharmaceutical manufacturers via
blogs, forums, and other social media and this opens up extended possibilities for
the industry to communicate with patients via online DTCA. At the same time we
see an expanding self-medication sector due to prescription drugs that are switched
to over-the-counter (OTC) products (Mahecha
2006
), leading to a further empower-
ment of the patient. Camacho et al. (
2010
) explore the changing role of the patient
in medical decision making. They observe a trend towards more participatory deci-
sion making and develop a patient-centered marketing approach, where both
patients and physicians are targeted by marketing efforts where the focus is on the
patient rather than on the patient's disease or the physician. This requires a change
in marketing, which until now has mainly aimed at infl uencing the physician's deci-
sion. This also implies that DTCA will become more important and may explain the
current high level of expenditures. We believe that it is important to study how these
developments affect category- and brand level demand, promotional effectiveness,
price elasticities, and whether internet empowered patients change diffusion pat-
terns of newly developed drugs.
In this chapter we have indicated the many opportunities which remain to model
the (aggregate) demand for pharmaceuticals. We also show that there are still many
issues to be investigated and that the outcomes are likely to depend on the modeling
approach and the situation studied and we specify some future research avenues in
this highly interesting and challenging area.
References
Achilladelis B, Antonakis N (2001) The dynamics of technological innovation: the case of the
pharmaceutical industry. Res Policy 30(4):535-588
Albers S, Mantrala MK, Sridhar S (2010) Personal selling elasticities: a meta-analysis. J Mark Res
47(5):840-853
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