Closing the Marketing Strategy-Tactics Gap: An Institutional Theory Analysis of Pharmaceutical Value Chain - Innovation and Marketing in the Pharmaceutical Industry - page 696

physician-resources/medical-ethics/code-medical-ethics.page , and U.K. Medical
Council's Good Medical Practice at http://www.gmc-uk.org/guidance/good_medi-
cal_practice.asp ) . Thus, pharmaceutical marketing efforts directed at building close
relationships with physicians may amplify the problem of confl icted logics. Moore
et al. ( 2006 , p. 11) note that “doctors are loath to admit” that confl ict of logics
“slant” their professional judgments even as they are “succumbing” to them and
“ believe that their biased advice is unbiased.”
Insights are needed to map how the confl icted logics of the pharmaceutical value
chain unfold over time, and what factors amplify or diminish the underlying confl ict.
Although the logics of pharmaceutical marketing and physician practice are theoreti-
cally confl icted, in practice the logics may coexist without posing impediments to
collaborative relationships in the value chain. For instance, the pharmaceutical indus-
try may pursue its consequential goals indirectly or passively while directly or actively
focusing on value creation by emphasizing its products and therapies that serve appro-
priateness goals of the value chain. The nature and degree of confl ict in practice will
vary by pharmaceutical industry's choices of strategy content, and the dynamics they
engender. Thus, we conduct a systematic and comprehensive examination of pharma-
ceutical promotion practices and thereafter intersect the fi ndings with the discourse in
academic medicine to examine the nature and degree of confl ict between the logics
and its evolution over time.

24.3 Study Data and Analytical Approach

A particularly useful source for unadulterated view of the industry's strategies is
publicly available court documents generated as part of discovery in a litigation
involving industry marketing practices. The laws governing public access to court
records provide detailed, authenticated, and otherwise proprietary data for review
and analysis. Court records include internal memos, contractual arrangements,
internal/consultant reports, strategy and tactics, fi nancial/accounting analyses, and
other related materials that are “discovered” during the process of case fi ling and
research. Discovery materials do not inherently indicate illegal practices. Many
materials represent business as usual, and are used to provide the background for
developing the court's arguments and evidence.
A careful, comprehensive, and thorough analysis of these discovery documents
can provide a unique insight into industry practices that are neither illegal nor
unconventional and are otherwise not available for public scrutiny. Moreover, trian-
gulating these insights with those available from the professional medicine and
popular press literature is likely to bolster the confi dence in the obtained insights
and mitigate the risk that stems from analyzing a single case that may be idiosyn-
cratic or atypical. Recent research has increasingly used court documents to obtain
insights into pharmaceutical marketing (Ross et al. 2008 ; Psaty and Kronmal 2008 ;
Healy and Cattell 2003 ). Nevertheless, court cases are subject to biases of small
(e.g., N = 1) and unrepresentative samples, and caution is warranted in generalizing
from such analyses.