Executive Summary
This article reviews and develops marketing knowledge specific to the life sciences industry, defined as companies in pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, and therapeutic medical devices. The authors focus on therapy pipeline optimization, innovation alliance formation, and product positioning decisions (in therapy creation); global market entry timing and key opinion leader selection decisions (in therapy launch); and sales force management, communication management, and patient compliance decisions (in therapy promotion).
The authors qualify these decision areas according to their importance to both life sciences firms and health care providers and payers. They find that firms and health care providers and payers diverge in the perceived importance of certain marketing decision areas. For example, life sciences marketers emphasize the profit implications of sales force management, while health care payers and providers emphasize the life sciences firm’s role in stimulating patient compliance (a role it too often neglects). Because such divergence gives rise to potential conflict in the health care value chain, there is a strong need for the life sciences industry to increasingly adopt a partnership model toward providers and payers, which could lead to enhanced legitimacy in the long run for life sciences firms.
Although further testing is needed, the generalizations and propositions the authors derive may provoke some firms to alter their marketing approach. For example, their propositions on opinion leaders encourage a dual-layer strategy of firms: At launch, they may rely on clinical leaders (mostly through research cooperation), and as experience with the therapy’s side effects grow, market leaders may be actively involved (e.g., through specialized detailing). The propositions on compliance should trigger firms to analyze the underlying characteristics of the disease and the patient to steer them to a suitable type of program, enabled by either customer relationship management or technology. The authors also review prior research and derive generalizations from it regarding decisions such as alliance formation, sales force management, and communication (e.g., direct-to-consumer advertising [DTCA]) management. For example, on the basis of this prior literature, it may be concluded that many firms’ inflated expectations of the positive effect of DTCA on brand sales (cf. the very high spending on DTCA among life sciences firms) are probably unrealistic.
Biography
Stefan Stremersch is Chaired Professor of Marketing and Desiderius Erasmus Distinguished Chair of Economics in the Erasmus School of Economics at Erasmus University Rotterdam (the Netherlands) and is Visiting Professor of Marketing in the IESE Business School at the Universidad de Navarra, Barcelona. His research interest is in innovation diffusion and marketing of technology and science. His work has appeared in International Journal of Research in Marketing, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science, and Management Science. He has won the Harold H. Maynard Best Paper Award of Journal of Marketing (2002), the AMA Global Excellence Award (2006) and the AMA Early Career Award (2008), among others. He also received the 2004 Research Prize at Erasmus University Rotterdam for outstanding research performance, selected among all Erasmus faculty across all disciplines and schools. He currently serves as editor of International Journal of Research in Marketing, together with Don Lehmann.
Walter Van Dyck is Assistant Professor Technology and Innovation Management in the TiasNimbas Business School at Tilburg University, the Netherlands. He obtained a DBA from Cranfield University, with the highest honors. He also holds an MBA from Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School and bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Social and Military Sciences from the Royal Military Academy in Belgium. Before joining academia, he was an associate partner at IBM Business Consulting Services in the former PricewaterhouseCoopers’s Strategy Practice. He counseled global players, such as Philips and Johnson & Johnson, in high-tech and life sciences in the domains of strategic innovation management and new product development. His current research and teaching focus on strategic innovation management and the marketing of science and emerging technologies through corporate venturing.
Journal of Marketing, Volume 73, Number 4, July 2009
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