Sales & Marketing

Patient materials should reflect what patients want to know in a language they can quickly understand.

Seniors represent an ideal, captive audience. Because they tend to have more leisure time, they are often willing to take the time to read in-depth information.

Sanofi-Aventis' campaign for Taxotere elicits an emotional response from oncologists.

Despite heightened scrutiny from industry advocates and the beginnings of self-imposed regulation, pharma companies' violations of DTC regulations have been getting worse, says Tom Abrams, director of FDA's Division of Drug Marketing, Advertising, and Communications (DDMAC). Abrams has been on all sides of drug marketing, from receiving promotions as a pharmacist to creating promotions as a member of industry to regulating promotions as the head of DDMAC. As such, he's in good position to see the big picture.

By immersing themselves in the culture of the target audience-visiting where they live, shop, and consume media-marketers can discover what consumers want and need before they demand it.

The most salient feature of the Medicare prescription drug benefit is its uncertainties. That was perhaps the key insight at a roundtable conducted by Pharmaceutical Executive in conjunction with the executive summit "Medicare Part D: Can There Be Alignment Between Government Goals and Industry Opportunity?" cosponsored by this magazine and Model N, a revenue management-solution provider. With a panel that included representatives from pharma, the legal community, prescription benefit managers, and data and service providers, the roundtable looked at the goals of Part D, the threats and opportunities it presents to stakeholders, the skills companies need to develop, and the way the playing field is likely to change over the next few years. What follows is an edited version of the conversation.

While the typical brand invests more than $100 million in annual sales force support, it spends on average less than $2 million to determine whether the detail piece is driving prescriptions.

PhRMA Guiding Principle number 10 calls for the banishment of reminder ads. While there are many reasons why drug ads truly advance the public health, there are no good arguments for why reminder ads advance public health in any way.

Newly diagnosed patients are looking for a third-party shoulder to lean on, or someone to talk to aside from a physician.

The most important result for pharma firms of the changing sales structure is a reduction in the amount of training resources that are available to them.

The circumstances of Crawford's departure may complicate the process of securing a permanent FDA leader. Congress and HHS are investigating whether his confirmation process failed to uncover important facts.

Valeant is banking on Viramidine, a pro-drug of its longtime cash cow, ribavirin, to catapult the company to the next level.

When investigating a health condition, most consumers search for information by inputting their symptoms. Offering symptoms-related information on your site could help improve its ranking.

Growing by Indication, Genentech Has a New Type of Blockbuster

TO HEAR JAMIE REIDY TELL IT, HE'S ALWAYS BEEN THE SORT of slacker who succeeds. He did enough work to get decent grades in high school and at Notre Dame University, which he attended on an ROTC scholarship.

Think of the role compliance plays in your job. Now imagine that level of concern increased by 25 percent, 50, or even more. That's what pharma has to look forward to in the next few years, as the effects of old regulatory initiatives, such as 21 CFR Part 11 and Sarbanes Oxley, start fully kicking in-and as we experience the as-yet-unknown regulatory fallout of the new concern with drug safety. It's no surprise that a great portion of this volume of Pharm Exec's Successful Product Manager's Handbook series is given over to compliance.

Sales reps should be able to access, in a central location, company-enerated influences that have affected a given physician. This type of closed- loop marketing creates a more customer-centric approach that provides etter influencer-level insight by connecting each resource, providing direction and metrics, and continually re-evaluating key influences and ROI.

Product managers would be less disrupted if compliance activities at pharma companies were more anticipatory than reactionary.

Martin Soeters (pronounced soo't rs) has dedicated a quarter century-almost half his life-to the company at which he's now president of US operations. Novo Nordisk, where Soeters has worked since 1980-in various executive roles and locations, from The Netherlands (his homeland) to Belgium to France-is a leader in diabetes treatment, with the largest portfolio in the industry.

As the industry thinks about new sales force models, it should look beyond ROI numbers, toward a new paradigm that not only works for pharma, but also for its customers.

Because mobile devices are a convenient source for breaking headlines and other news, many physicians have adopted mobile news services to stay abreast of specialty journals and clinical news.

No brand manufacturers plan to market generic versions of their own product, at least not until the patent expires. And why would they? As long as the branded version enjoys patent protection, marketing a cut-rate product would eat away profit margin during the years when a drug makes the most money.

The client-agency relationship is a product of its environment. Chock-full of regulatory requirements, scandals, and heightened FDA scrutiny, the current environment leaves much to be desired. But this is hardly news for the pharma industry.

The ideal healthcare package, in addition to reflecting the quality of the product it contains, fortifies brand equity and differentiates the product in the marketplace.

Data suggest that pharma companies engage the same key opinion leaders on assignments in three to seven departments or product groups at once.

To get along with the CFO, drug companies need to express more data in units that a health plan can integrate into its own internal actuarial analysis. The financial decision makers at a health plan want to know how a new drug affects the value of expected claims on the whole.

There comes a point when people have enough stuff in their lives, but they can never have enough meaning. Leaders have to find opportunities for their eams to do more than turn the machine of profit.

Market researchers often fail to realize that whenever they collect competitor information they are in fact collecting competitive intelligence. The same is true in reverse.

The pharmaceutical industry devotes more of its promotional budget to samples than anything else, unless you count the army of sales representatives that delivers them. This year, the average wholesale price of samples passed out to doctors will approach $15 billion-roughly twice the value of samples five years ago. And although few in the industry have come to grips with it, the federal regulations governing this enormous investment have undergone drastic changes.