Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
2008
, p. 1062) and propose a “fi rewall between marketing and science” (Antonuccio
et al.
2003
, p. 1028). Several topics by medical practitioners claiming to unveil
industry strategies paint a dark picture of an industry focused on maximizing profi ts
at any cost (Petersen
2003
; Angell
2005
; Murray
2010
). Swayed by this publicity,
the pharmaceutical industry has seen its public standing fall from a 50 % (1998) to
less than 12 % (2010) favorable rating in a
Harris survey of public trust
,
2
with 46 %
favoring more governmental regulation, and its index of drug stocks decline by
25 % over the last 5 years (Collis and Smith
2007
). Angelmar (
2005
, p. 1) summa-
rizes this trend by noting that the pharmaceutical industry's “business model has
come undone.”
Given such aversive response, the strategy-tactics gap in the pharmaceutical mar-
keting literature is inexplicable.
3
Lack of systematic studies of pharmaceutical mar-
keting strategies lends an impression of uncontested validity to the mostly hostile
studies reported in the medical literature. Thus, the strategy-tactics gap warrants
attention from researchers interested in pharmaceutical marketing. In particular,
two questions are germane to our study:
1. What specifi c marketing strategies do pharmaceutical companies use to engage
medical practitioners, and how do these strategies relate to particular tactics?
2. Under what conditions and why do pharmaceutical marketing strategies amplify
(or diminish) the aversive (approving) response from its value chain partners?
This chapter aims to address the preceding questions by making three contribu-
tions. First, we aim to conduct a systematic analysis of a pharmaceutical company's
marketing strategies and relating them to specifi c tactics deployed to engage medical
practitioners. Our theoretical lens is institutional theory which is well suited for exam-
ining the organizing logics that underlie strategy (Oliver
1991
; DiMaggio and Powell
1983
; Scott
1987
). Our premise is that understanding value chain implications of
organizational strategy requires an explicit consideration of legitimacy, not just profi t-
ability, outcomes. No previous study has utilized institutional theory to examine phar-
maceutical marketing strategies or its value chain implications (see, however, Singh
and Jayanti
2013
).
Second, this chapter empirically examines the dynamics of value chain's response
to pharmaceutical marketing strategies using the concept of institutional logics. The
institutional view conceives “logics” as socially constructed mental models that
groups of individuals hold as shared cognitions of socialized routines for action that
2
The
Harris Interactive
survey is a longitudinal study of public trust across a range of industries
and asks the following question, “Do you think each of the following does a good or bad job of
serving its customers?” The results reported here are from a report in the
Economist
titled,
“Prescription for Change,” published June 16, 2005.
3
To some extent, this neglect is indicative of lack of access to data on pharmaceutical strategy mak-
ing, much of which is proprietary. By contrast, data on promotion spend has been made relatively
accessible by research agencies such as IMS, Wolters Kluver and Verispan.
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