Abstract
For all the complexity of our industry, a few salient features stand out as those that will shape its future. With some difficulty, we can discern the wood from the trees (I believe the phrase is forest from the trees in the US!). In so doing, we clarify and prioritise the important issues that we need to understand if we are to survive and thrive in the future, quite different commercial environment that the pharmaceutical and medical technology industries might present to us. When we select paper for the Journal of Medical Marketing, we try to pay special attention to those important market factors that will frame our market and, in this issue, we present a selection of new research that I hope is important and timely.
Let me begin with Hyojin Kim and Chunsik Lee’s paper about DTC advertising. Few would doubt that, as the willingness and ability of healthcare systems to pay retracts, relative to what is technologically possible, the role of the consumer will become relatively more important. It’s therefore important to understand how they react to advertising. Just as importantly, the industry’s critics will inevitably claim that medical marketing is not always in the best interests of the patient or society and it is important that this argument is based on research and reason rather than emotion. So this paper is very useful to medical marketers and policy makers alike. It looks at the risk that fear appeals or endorsements might overpower patients’ or consumers’. Its findings do not substantiate this risk but provide a very useful guide to those who seek to design or control Direct to Consumer advertising.
In many of the companies I research with and advise, the idea of being patient centric has become a mantra, if not always one substantiated by patient centric activity and values. Sanjay K Rao’s paper takes the idea of patient centricity into the realm of commercial strategy with some very interesting ideas. His paper discusses how patient centricity might drive new growth strategies and is richly interested with some apposite examples. The paper makes strong claims, almost suggesting that patient centricity is the answer to the industry’s problems. Certainly, for any firm claiming to be patient centric, Sanjay’s paper is at least a challenge and, for many, will be a strong stimulus for strategic change.
Our next paper discusses medical marketing in an emerging market that is small – the Yemen – but which is a useful analogue for many emerging markets. To succeed in such markets, we will need to understand more about how the behaviour of healthcare professionals is influenced and to avoid the mistake of referencing against our home markets. In this paper, Adnan Yahya Al-Hamdi and his colleagues probe into a market and set of marketing practices that are very different for those in the rich-world economies, bordering on the unethical in many cases. I think this is an important paper, providing not only evidence that some parts of the industry need to change but also providing guidance as to what form that change should take. I commend this paper for marketers operating in emerging markets.
Our next paper comes from an author we have seen before in the journal – Joel Davis. It will be of great interest to medical marketers trying to ensure compliance with FDA and other regulations on websites and promotional material. Joel has carried out an extensive and intensive study of the way that websites present a balanced view of risks and benefits. His findings, that less than 5% of sites provide complete, specific, and numeric description of drug efficacy while nearly 80% describe drug efficacy exclusively in vague and general terms, is something of an indictment of the industry. It should be an alarm call to both medical marketers and the regulators.
Our fifth paper, by Michael Sanky and his colleagues, in some ways echoes our second, in that it concerns patients’ role in strategy and patient segmentation in particular. However, it takes the complementary perspective of improving care provision, especially with respect to reducing patient re-admission. This work is an interesting example of what the famous Donald Schőn called the displacement of concepts because it transfers ideas from the marketing domain in order to better identify and manage patients at high risk of readmission. This is a lovely piece of work that I was delighted to see submitted. Its ideas and concepts have a very wide application.
Our final paper is one of those that had to go through an especially blinded process beyond our normal double-blind peer review. That is because it is one of my own papers and I was not allowed to select or know who the reviewers were. However immodestly, I hope it is valuable. Since it addresses market access, it is certainly relevant to both pharmaceutical and medical technology sectors. As one of the reviewers pointed out, it is, to the best of our knowledge, the first attempt to rigorously define what we mean by market access strategy and to identify what differentiates strong and weak strategies. I hope therefore that it, and the other papers in this issue, will attract interest from our readers.
Professor Brian D Smith