Market Research…..our survey said

pharmafile | July 31, 2006 | Feature | Sales and Marketing |  market research 

Marrying traditional techniques

Despite researchers' natural leaning towards either qualitative or quantitative research, it is clear that the two types of research are intrinsically linked, and neither qualitative nor quantitative research can practically be used in isolation.

The market research cycle is continuous – qualitative feeds into quantitative, which feeds into qualitative. One key use of this process is the testing of attitudes. Multi-dimensional and qualitative research on compliance in a range of therapy areas enables the compilation of a suite of tailored attitudinal statements which can then be tested on a quantitative basis, using segmentation techniques.

A number of different patient segments, each responding differently to compliance factors, can then be identified, leading to qualitative work which enables the segmentation study to be more effectively directed in order to provide more meaningful data.

More qualitative work will promote understanding of the emotional drivers of compliance for key therapeutic areas, thus continuing the cycle of questions.

Having a flexible mindset is key to researching issues in the most effective way  pulling quantitative elements into qualitative findings and interpreting quantitative results allied with qualitative learnings.

For each piece of research, the question for the researcher to ask is not 'qual or quant?' but 'what should the balance of the qual and quant be?' The benefits of such a holistic approach are that it ultimately leads to greater return on investment.

Jeanette Harwood is research director of Healthcare Research Worldwide

Maximising advertising campaigns

Every pharma company wants a new blockbuster, a drug that will generate sales in excess of $1 billion per year, the equivalent to the total R&D investment needed to bring the drug to launch. Predictions have been made that around 100 new blockbusters will be launched by 2008, but everyone accepts such discoveries are increasingly hard to make.

With reduced investment available for R&D, drug development costs rising by 8% per annum, and many of the biggest blockbusters nearing the end of their patent life, it is imperative that pharmas screen out losers and identify likely winners as early in the R&D process as possible.

Success is dependent on a drug's efficacy and tolerability, and also on the market's needs and the product's appeal to prescribers and/or patients.

Concept screening is like panning for gold, the art being to find the nugget hidden among similar material with no market value. Starting with a large number of potential new products, new indications, new formats and/or new positioning, the aim is to reduce the options to a manageable number for which the necessary investment can be channelled; developing and launching a product with strong appeal at a premium price.

Successful screening addresses all the following questions: How large is the market for my product? What drugs, if any, are currently prescribed/taken? What gaps exist in the market? Will my product address these gaps? How is my product different from those of my competitors? What will my product be worth to my business when launched?

While standardised approaches exist for concept screening, the final approaches need to be tailored to the specific needs of the company. The difficulties facing companies are considerable, as the need to combine qualitative and quantitative techniques in an appropriate manner in a global marketplace presents the industry with real challenges.

Dr Ian G Catchpole is senior director at Ipsos MORI Health

Taking research online

In the pharmaceutical sector, as in other sectors, large samples, speed of fieldwork and reliability of results have encouraged commissioners of market research to move towards the online channel of the internet.

The disadvantage of this is that the market researcher has less control over respondents than with other methods, partly because of the speed of response and partly because most samples are free found, abandoning the established principle of quotas.

Careful questionnaire design so that phrasing is clear and unambiguous is essential. Consistency is ensured as all respondents are exposed to exactly the same questions in the same format with no interviewer interpretation of questions or answers,  although one disadvantage is that it may be easier for respondents to abandon questionnaires than with other methods, especially if the questionnaires are exceedingly long or complicated.

However, the fact that respondents can undertake these surveys at a time and place convenient to them, at a pace that suits them, is a significant benefit of the online methodology.

Further, any type of medium such as images, sounds, voice, music, film, can be exhibited and responses collected at any point. This gives the online methodology tremendous flexibility and breadth. The facility to collect legible and codeable free text responses is an added benefit.

For quantitative studies, the online methodology is probably the highest quality and most reliable one available at present, and the speed of obtaining results is an incidental benefit.

Qualitative research using the internet is still in its infancy, but this will surely become established and follow in the footsteps of its quantitative sibling.

Dr Rino Coladangelo is chief executive at Medix UK

Addressing brand uncertainty

The majority of a brand's value can be won or lost over the initial months of its life. The launch is the most critical time for a brand, and it is also the period of highest uncertainty. At this time, market research plays a pivotal role.

It can address the fundamentals of market planning to identify the needs of prospective customers, how these are currently addressed and how future options may be mapped against those needs. These insights will provide the foundations for a brand's positioning.

The dynamics of the market place and how it works must be understood in detail –  who makes the decisions, who has the influence and how this is disseminated  to allow promotional strategies to evolve. Then assumptions and plans can be quantified, assessed and tested.

Market research plays a role, not only in providing insight where there is uncertainty, but also by giving a strategic view of how and when these uncertainties and unknowns will be addressed  over the first few months of the launch process and over the entire launch planning cycle.

Eric Sharp is marketing manager at IMS Health UK

Succeeding with NICE submissions

A successful NICE submission makes a convincing, evidence-based business case, and market research is the route to understanding its key elements.

These elements can include:

* The clinical needs not being met and those the product meets

* The cost of treating patients and the net costs that could be avoided if the product were to be used in the target population

* Qualitative benefits the treatment would bring to patients compared with current practice

* Stakeholders' opinions on the existing service and/or the future patterns of service.

Researching the market requires a range of skills and the key to success is to apply varying approaches in order to secure the right evidence.

Dr Mark Charny is managing director of Translucency

Integrating stages across the brand

It is critical that strategic segmentation market research is conducted well and early enough to have the best opportunity to create a differentiated brand strategy.

Customer needs should drive this and by using market research to map the needs, successful segmentation can be achieved for new brands.

Studies to assess product uptake, value and pricing all link into forecasting, and market research, combined with the skills of well designed questions and market modelling, can support the many decisions needed on the brand.

Tracking the brand equity is becoming more strategic, and by doing this, more long-term brand equity is established. Expanding the brand values involves making choices on how the brand use can be extended, but this work has to start early (pre-launch even), especially if long-term clinical studies are required.

The future of the brand after patent expiry needs to be planned, with the goal of maximising value towards the end of the lifecycle. Heritage strategies to maintain customer loyalty, or insight to help understand how to transfer loyalty to the company's next generation of products, require information on the customer and competitors to be constantly reviewed.

Angelina Dolan is director of Adelphi International Research

Seeking competitive marketing edge

In today's marketplace, companies wanting to generate a competitive edge have replaced instinctive, gut-feeling decisions with well thought through decisions, supported by robust market intelligence data, and this marketing research support has a role at all stages in a product's life cycle.

Qualitative approaches are used to understand rational and non-rational motivations, values, beliefs and drivers in a market, both at pre-launch and at stages when the competitive landscape changes.

An array of quantitative techniques can be used to define key features and develop the optimal positioning for a product.  Furthermore, research is invaluable when setting prices for new products, and segmentation studies can inform choices made around a promotional approach, based on the differing needs of the relevant customer audience.

Marketing research is also widely used to help develop product advertising that really works from a marketing point of view. It is used to help develop sales campaigns and materials that are compelling, and to help get a fuller picture of the impact and effect of promotional efforts.  This allows for informed, beneficial changes to be made in a way that sustains competitive advantage.

These days, wise marketing managers manage their gut feelings, and base their decisions on robust data drawn from well constructed marketing research.

Andrew Forman is group business director of Insight Research Group

Keeping up with NHS changes

Target lists of healthcare professionals are required at many different levels within pharma companies and for numerous commercially motivated reasons. To build or augment an intelligent target list, a combination of hard and soft data can be used.

For example, we had to build a target list for a client launching an existing product in Parkinson's disease. They needed to establish its market potential (which trusts were treating proportionally more PD patients) and budget impact (which PCTs are funding these treatments). Critically, they also needed to know which neurology centres and departments are interested in the area and why, to inform the client's key message delivery.

The hard data this required came from Hospital Episode Statistics (HES), to segment the trusts in terms of their volume of PD cases, to which would be added analysis to give context and suggestion to the pure ranking of trusts.

The soft data gathered related to those neurologists who were interested, motivated or compelled to act on PD. Clinicians were approached via written requests, by fax-shot, or orally by tele-researchers, after which interviewers were then deployed to capture the data directly from the clinicians' secretaries.

Provided that the survey is kept short and easy to complete, response rates of 80% can be achieved for the soft data, and 100% for the hard data. The overall result is a comprehensive picture of PD-related interest and relative caseload.

Jason Bryant is sales director at Binley's, part of the Wilmington Group

Measuring key performance

Historically, success for promotional activities meant achieving a certain coverage or frequency. Nowadays, the focus is much more on measuring performance against a long list of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and market research plays a central role in defining these.

The issue lies in ensuring which KPIs are the main triggers for an improvement in ROI. The next step will be to make sure that the indicators are consistently measurable across time, geography and products.

Using qualitative market research, it is possible to produce a list of the main indicators that need to be included in the list of KPIs, while quantitative research helps to rank each variable according to priority. It is also a valuable tool to produce dashboards that show brand and sales managers a birds-eye view of the performance of their brands.

Market research is also increasingly used to benchmark medical marketing activities of specific pharma companies against those of competitors.

The focus is typically on the number of activities undertaken with either key opinion leaders or physicians involved in clinical trials. In order to justify increased investments in key physician-related projects, it is important to show an index that indicates medical marketing spending.

Telephone and mail-based research to determine physicians' influence networks in specific therapy areas across primary and secondary care, has allowed pharmaceutical companies to identify, visualise and capitalise on powerful network information and to literally connect individual physicals to one another.

Understanding these influencer networks can be critical to the successful launch of a new product.

There are many research tools for benchmarking, but key to any of them is consistency. The more indicators are changed, the less there is to measure against.

Mark Kroes is general manager Europe, strategic solutions at Dendrite

Fine-tuning detail aids

Often criticised by GPs, detail aids remain one of the most important methods of communication for pharmaceutical companies.

As such, research continues to be key in terms of identifying what is communicated and the brand response this creates.

Therefore, it is vital that research provides specific, honest and actionable directions, rather than feedback on which elements worked. To enable this, it is important to remember detail aids are not received in isolation and other factors, such as key speaker meetings, should also be considered.

It is also crucial that all parties involved pool their knowledge and expectations of what the materials can realistically achieve and how they will be employed. Representative feedback, for example, can often provide a valuable source of otherwise unconsidered factors. The opportunity to work doctors harder in research sessions should also not be overlooked. They are not creatives, but a typical GP will have vast experience of sales aids.

As alternative communications, such as e-detailing, emerge, we need to work together to ensure detail aids provide maximum value.

Diana Hislop is research director at Branding Science

Market research today

The issues raised by our contributors demonstrate the breadth of applications for market research and how it can address the challenges pharma faces in today's competitive environment.

Certainly, traditional debates encompassing quantative or qualitative issues persist. But added to these are a number of variations of the theme of the increasing urgency for speedy returns on the R&D investment.

The dearth of blockbusters on the horizon and the critical importance of the immediate launch period for any drug are just two reasons to maximise marketing efforts, with the hoped-for aim of boosting sales.

As our contributors point out, there are a number of different ways market research can  contribute, ranging from perfecting pre-launch marketing planning to fine-tuning detail aids or maximising the impact of new advertising campaigns.

Overall, the issues confirm market research as a highly relevant discipline to pharma sales and marketing.

Pharmafocus would like to thank all the agencies for their contributions