Marketing of the Life Sciences
The article by Stefan Stremersch and Walter Van Dyck in the July 2009 issue of (Marketing of the Life Sciences: A New Framework and Research Agenda for a Nascent Field) offers an informative framework on Life Sciences. It also outlines directions for future research on life sciences marketing as an exciting new line of inquiry.
Figures 1, 2, and 3 in the article reflect the characteristics of the Life Sciences industry, including its key decision areas in marketing (therapy creation, therapy launch, and therapy promotion), its key boundaries, and its structure. The key decision areas were informed by an extensive literature search. Subsequent surveys of life sciences marketing practitioners and health care payers and providers yielded importance ratings of these key decision areas, respectively, from firm-profit and patient welfare perspectives. The results from an additional survey of marketing academics (with research-based knowledge of the life sciences industry) present perspectives on areas in which further research is most needed (therapy pipeline optimization, global market entry timing, key opinion leader selection, and stimulating patient compliance).
The authors offer several useful propositions and generalizations that could be explored in future research. Appendix A offers a particularly useful summary that maps the authors’ key decision areas in marketing with prior literature. For example, it shows that the selection of key opinion leader is an area that has not been studied thus far. More important, the survey approach described above significantly enhances the relevance of the future research agenda presented, in terms of firm, welfare, and academic perspectives. Finally, the authors describe data sources that could be used by future researchers to test these propositions.
Overall, this article presents a very conducive setting for future researchers in life sciences marketing, because the authors have already completed much of the spadework needed to motivate research. I hope it stimulates a lot of exciting new empirical studies. As always, I welcome the enthusiastic participation of JM readers in this blog thread.
Siva K. Balasubramanian, Journal of Marketing Web Site Editor
Comments
The article it's very interesting.
I' m working in a biotech company so every day i have to face questions which are uniques, differents from those of any other industry.
But i' m happy with my studies (degree in marketing) that offered to me solid instruments to work even in life science.
Posted by: simon | July 17, 2009 11:48 AM
A very interesting article indeed!
Life sciences industry offers unique challenges to the marketers due to the nature of the products, the product life cycle, patent regime, etc. A long product development period coupled with very small success rate further creates a huge challenge for the marketers to make the commercialized product a success.
Owing to clarify marketing strategies in life-sciences industry, the authors have identified 3 key marketing decision areas in which the life-science marketers usually face challenges (Figure 1): Therapy creation, Therapy Launch, and Therapy Promotion. The method (Figure4) for identification of these areas is very exhaustive as shown by the extensive literature review (in Appendix A) and interviews conducted. Various areas such as alliance formations, communications management, and patient compliance are discussed as part of the key decision areas.
The authors give insights yielding importance ratings of these key decision areas from firm-profit and patient welfare perspectives. For example, high profit-oriented and low patient welfare approach causes pharma sales representatives to be generally denied from entry in hospitals.
In conclusion, the article draws similarity of life-sciences firms with main-stream companies by emphasizing a need to take an integrated view of their customer’s health. For example, the pharma companies should be more patient-oriented than being product-oriented. Further, the authors proposed a generalization called the “dual-layer strategy”. According to this, in the beginning the firm should rely on clinical leader and later move on to market leader as the active player. This generalization is a potential area for further research in a step towards achieving maximum efficiency of the marketing efforts.
Overall, I find this article as a great insight for development of future research in the very huge but still very nascent life-sciences marketing industry.
Posted by: Rahul Gupta | November 15, 2009 7:59 AM