Journal of Medical Marketing: Device,Diagnostic and Pharmaceutical Marketing

A core dimension of cultural orientation is the extent to which a country is individualistic versus collectivistic. The purpose of this study is to examine whether the extent that one is individualistic moderates the persuasive effects of fear appeals in anti-smoking public service announcements. A total of 129 undergraduates in the United States and South Korea participated in an experiment designed to test the hypothesis that individualists respond better to an anti-smoking PSA with emphasis on an individualistic fear appeal, whereas a PSA stressing a collectivistic fear appeal is more effective among collectivists. The results supported the hypothesis, implying that fear appeals in anti-smoking PSAs should address the target audience’s cultural orientation. The study also showed that an individual’s cultural orientation is not necessarily determined by their country of origin. That is, the effects of fear appeals were moderated by the individual’s internalized cultural orientation, not their country of origin per se. The study closes with commentary on the scholarly and practical implications of the findings.

The Indian Pharmaceutical sector is highly fragmented with more than 20,000 registered units. It has expanded drastically in the last two decades. At least as many as 250 pharmaceutical companies share lead of this market and are constantly challenged by severe price competition and government price control. In order to sustain competitive advantage, pharmaceutical companies have to develop and build brands that meet real needs and are differentiated in the minds of our customers. Brand equity is a set of brand asset and liabilities linked to a brand that includes brand loyalty, brand awareness, perceived quality and associations. The brand loyalty of the customer base is often the core of brand’s equity. Building awareness is much easier over a longer time period because learning works better with repetition and reinforcement. Perceived quality is the customer’s perception of the overall quality or superiority of a product service with respect to its intended purpose, relative to alternatives. Much research has been done on whether or not branding plays a role in consumer purchases. In case of pharmaceutical industry in India, creating good enough brand awareness, loyalty and communicating compelling quality for good perceptions amongst numerous generic environments is a key challenge to increase brand equity. The above original article focuses on three brand equity parameters (loyalty, awareness and quality) attribute of brand equity model of David Aaker. Primary research is conducted in India by the author in order to supplement information learned through secondary research, in order to answer specific questions to gain a perspective on consumers. Perceptions of branded versus generic drugs on the aspect of three parameters are studied here. Results are discussed, followed by recommendations about how to effectively increase brand parameters to impact brand equity of pharmaceutical products.

Market access for pharmaceuticals has become a key issue in the Italian National Health Service, for at least three reasons: (i) market access delays are very high in Italy compared to other countries; (ii) drug policy is mostly driven by cost-containment both at national and regional/local levels; (iii) pharmaceutical policies have been decentralised, thus creating a very fragmented environment. These issues highlight the importance of market access and account management both at the national and the regional/local levels. The organization of market access by pharmaceutical companies in a complex environment, such as the Italian one, has never been investigated in the literature so far. Hence, this research contributes to fill the gap, surveying the industry’s perceptions and reactions on a wide range of dimensions concerning market access. More specifically, this paper aims at answering the following research questions: how is market access defined and organised? In which phases of the product life-cycle do companies invest more in market access? Which are the perceived most appropriate tools for market access? Which are the perceived main obstacles to market access? How is the market access performance evaluated? The research question has been investigated through a structured questionnaire, which has been subject to a validation process. Responders were selected according to size (sales) in order to include firms that are more likely to introduce structural changes and to create sub-units. Overall, 43 companies accounting for a cumulated 80% market share (retail + hospitals) were involved. The questionnaire was sent to the General director/Chief executive, who selected the key informant(s). Results show that (i) market access is mostly associated with public affairs and pricing and reimbursement functions; only those companies, whose responder has associated market access with a commercial activity, invest more on actions aimed at fostering market penetration; (ii) market access benefits from tools that (a) increase the knowledge of the relevant target and (b) give evidence of the drug’s value (economic evaluation and Health Technology Assessment) or its financial sustainability (budget impact analysis) and (iii) access to regional markets seems to be the most critical issue, thus confirming access problems deriving from decentralisation.

With this quantitative research, we made an attempt to investigate physicians’ prescribing decision-making characteristics and generic medicines’ favorability. Specifically, we investigated physicians’ attitudes toward: (a) generic medicine companies brands, (b) generic medicines companies’ communications, (c) physician-prescribing criteria, (d) key success factors that may increase generic medicines’ prescriptions and (e) potential generic medicines’ deficits. Moreover, we searched for significant differences among the research participants’ responses, in order to categorize them into meaningful groups. To this end, we addressed to a random sample of 250 physicians, which yielded a 42.4% response rate. The study involved extensive literature review and augmented quantitative data analysis, comprising reliability assessment and cluster analysis, among others. Research findings indicated participants clustering into three segments, that is, Generic Advocates, Generic Slacks and Generic Skeptics, reflecting distinct physician prescribing decision-making archetypes, with distinct prescribing criteria, favorability on various companies’ communication policies and prescribing behavior. The implication is that generic pharmaceutical companies may use the proposed physician segmentation in order to match their marketing strategies with the respective physician’s archetypes, regarded as generics’ purchasing decision-making actors. The paper also discusses research limitations and directions for future research.

This paper presents an overview of the health care system, current and anticipated health care challenges, and the potential for medical technology to address the health care needs of the People’s Republic of China. The implications of these topics for the modification of current strategies or development of new technologies to address the current and emerging health care needs in China will be reviewed in order to assess the industry’s current plans for expansion of their operations to the health care market in the People’s Republic of China.