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Revised 28 February 2003.

Abstract

In the current climate of decreasing margins and increased competition marketing, activities should and must give measurable return on investment (ROI). However, very few pharmaceutical marketers can accurately predict whether their operations plan will increase or decrease market share and by what amount. If they did predict direction accurately they would be hard pressed to really know which elements of their marketing mix (eg salesforce, journal advertising, opinion leader programmes, direct mail, e-Business activities etc) were directly contributing and by how much, and which aspects of their current programme were in fact contributing to impact in market share. This paper will demonstrate how pharmaceutical marketers can use doctor sentiment and benchmarking to: (1) Measure the impact of their current marketing campaigns in terms of what is leading to increases and decreases in market share. (2) Manage marketing to maximize impact to increase market share and ROI. (3) Predict market share direction with 95% accuracy and (4) understand how to tie marketing activities to corporate goals effectively.