Abstract
In a recent article for Clinica, the must-read news source for most medtech professionals, I wrote about the megatrends shaping the sector. Although the details of how they impact on the market are specific to each sub-market and product category, these megatrends apply broadly medtech and, to a large degree pharma too. I found it interesting therefore that the papers in this issue of the Journal of Medical Marketing reflected many of these trends and provided a much richer, empirically based description of them than I could in that short article.
The paper by John Bredican, Adam Mills and Kirk Plangger is a good example of how mobile technologies, especially smart phones, are shaping the market. As the authors report, this impact is very broad and both direct and indirect. It changes how patients consider their own health and how they interact with healthcare professionals. The problem or challenge for medical marketers is to make sense of these changes and so anticipate the business opportunities and threats they create. The authors of this paper make a useful contribution in this direction, positing a theoretical framework that helps us to see through the hype and understand what is going on in this area. I was especially happy to approve publication of this paper because of its usefulness to almost all medical marketers.
Not unrelated to mobile technology is the huge promise of social media, the subject examined by Edgar Huang and Christina Dunbar in their paper. For those medical marketers trying to see the wood for the trees in this evolving area, one of the issues has been the lack of much empirical data, so it was especially interesting to read this paper based on a large sample of posts and tweets. Among their many interesting findings is the fact that two-way communication channels seem to be much more effective than one-way marketing tools. Although this paper is concerned with the marketing of healthcare services, rather than products, I found its concepts and conclusions to be relevant to many of the medical technology and pharmaceutical companies I work with.
We are fortunate to have in this issue two papers that originate from CERGAS, the Centre for Research on Health and Social Care Management, based at Bocconi University in Milan. I have to declare an interest here, of course, since I do some of my work at Bocconi, but I am confident that the double-blind reviewing process has done its job and produced two excellent papers here. The first, by Giuditta Callea, Rosanna Tarricone and Ruben Mota, concerns the economic impact of a medical device company on a local economy. Based on a very good review of the literature and a case study, it shows that such impact is very broad and diverse, impacting on the local economy in many direct and indirect ways. Whilst this paper has obvious value to, for instance, local planners, it is also of interest to those who decide where to site firms, since it elaborates on the complex synergy between the firm and the local economy. The second of the two Bocconi papers is, as you might be able to tell from reading it, the foundations of a larger, more elaborate study that Bocconi is attempting. It addresses the problems that health technology assessments of medical technology are often flawed because they take a snap shot of cost and benefits at a point in time, usually at launch. This is despite the widely accepted fact that most medical technologies change over the life cycle of their categories. For example, product benefits are often enhances and completion often erodes prices. This paper looks at that phenomenon with a thorough review of the literature and proposals for future research.
Our last two papers in this issue both consider emerging markets, which are arguably the most important megatrend shaping the sector. The paper by Mohamed Azmi Hassali, Tan Ching Siang, Fahad Saleem1 and Hisham Aljadhey is based on work in Malaysia and examines pharmaceutical price wars amongst community pharmacists there. It reveals a complex story of interaction between the pharmacists, local legislation and pharmaceutical company marketing practice. This really is the “sharp end” of pharmaceutical marketing in emerging markets, seemingly far removed from the glamorous world of brand management, but an important factor in the success or otherwise of pharmaceutical companies in these newly important markets.
Our final paper also looks at the retailing of pharmaceuticals in emerging markets, this time in China. For pharmaceutical marketers seeking to penetrate this huge market, this is a very useful paper. It reveals the growth trends in the sector and channel. Using regression analysis, it reveals a number of useful trends. In particular, this work suggests that blind expansion of chains is not a good use of resources. Rather, the findings suggest that improving the quality of outlets and developing complimentary online channels is a more effective strategy component.
As ever, I hope this selection of papers interests our readers and provides both direct value and indirect, broader value for the time spent reading it. I always welcome readers’ comments and suggestions for content in the Journal of Medical Marketing.
Professor Brian D Smith
Editor, Journal of Medical Marketing