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Global consulting firm calls for revolution in drug marketing

Washington, DC Ray Moynihan

A global consulting firm is urging pharmaceutical companies to shift their marketing strategies from targeting individual doctors to influencing senior managers in healthcare systems.

The firm’s report Evidence based Healthcare: Overcoming Barriers in Europe has been produced by Frost & Sullivan, a firm providing "growth consulting" and advice to corporate clients in more than 50 countries.

It describes evidence based medicine as a revolution in health care but argues that drug companies’ marketing strategies have changed in a similar way. The report criticises existing strategies that promote individual drugs to individual clinicians on the basis of the drugs’ unique product specifications. It suggests instead that companies should routinely demonstrate at a more senior level how their medicines have "evidence based costed outcomes."

"The sector has to move away from the ‘selling-to-doctors’ approach and concentrate on moving up the management chain, thereby being able to influence events at the planning stage," says the report.

Targeting doctors about drugs remains one of the largest components of industry’s promotional spending, which has skyrocketed in recent years. In the United States promotional spending jumped from $11bn (£7bn; €10bn) in 1997 to $19bn in 2001, but according to Frost & Sullivan’s analysis the return on investment from marketing to primary care physicians is falling substantially.

"Overspending on marketing is endemic, with an unsustainable growth in promotional investment outstripping that of product sales. Thus either the sales and marketing efforts need to be more cost effective or spending will have to be cut back," says the report.

Although the report foreshadows a winding back of conventional marketing strategies, it envisages a much greater role for pharmaceutical companies within the basic infrastructure of the health system. Apart from influencing system managers, the report also urges drug companies to partner with other healthcare organisations — "particularly those able to offer care services." These suggestions come at a time when concerns about the current level of industry entanglement with the health system are already widespread.

Other solutions canvassed in the report involve much greater use of information technology to integrate care and measure its outcomes, and the setting up of more head-to-head drug trials, which can be more relevant and meaningful results than placebo-controlled studies.

The report argues that such head-to-head studies "will become mandatory if and when the EU introduces added therapeutic value as a condition for requiring approval."

It is also dismissive of some of the inflated claims being made about the benefits of individually tailored medicines, where genetic makeup is matched with an individualised solution. According to the report these solutions "have so far been slow to deliver on their initial promise, and there is little sign that there will be any dramatic breakthrough in their application."
 

Rapid Responses:

Read all Rapid Responses

Drug marketing deserves recognition

Peter R Mansfield
bmj.com, 29 Aug 2003 [Full text]