Articles
The Value of Postmarketing Studies
By Timothy Pratt, PhD
Originally published in PharmaVOICE, April 2006
Recently, Timothy Pratt, Ph.D., chief marketing officer and principal scientific advisor of MedNet Solutions, Inc., was asked to speak at a meeting.
"What gave me pause for a moment was the topic: the value of postmarketing studies and registries," he says. "It wasn't that I'd never thought about the topic. What concerned me was that it should even be a question. I was being invited to speak to an organization - a very large one, mind you - where a department was advocating setting up a postmarketing research initiative, but the broader corporation didn't see the value in it. I was being asked to describe my experiences in an effort to garner support. "
The presumption that postmarketing research is valuable is as intuitive and self-evident as EDC can save a lot of time and money and integrated CDMS/CTMS systems are the best, he says.
But the assumption of the value of postmarketing initiatives is not universally shared, he acknowledges.
"Let's start with a fundamental premise: This is marketing," Dr. Pratt says. "With that statement I have probably offended, or at the very least raised the hackles of, innumerable scientists, researchers, engineers, and government officials - most of whom regard marketing as an insidious, if necessary, evil. I will contend that all activities of all companies are inherently marketing based, and so a major problem of perception exists."
A Working Definition
Marketing is fundamentally about profitably matching what the company is capable of with what consumers want and are willing to pay for.
"This bedrock concept carries with it far-reaching ramifications: essentially, that the corporation that better markets by meeting more customers' needs versus the competition will be the most successful," he says. "When everyone - from the secretaries to the clean-room workers, to the scientists, to the accountants, to even those who have marketing in their titles - recognizes they are ultimately working to meet the needs of the customers, they are engaging in marketing."
Successful companies make a concerted effort to help their people understand how they meet customers' needs in some form or another. They do this because the company that markets the best wins.
There are different points of view as to how to do this. A popular one in many companies is the better mousetrap paradigm: build it and they will come. He says this is especially attractive to those who live in a world of formulas and machines.
"Unfortunately, if what has been built does not meet someone's needs, it doesn't matter how elegant an engineering or chemical feat the company has performed, it simply won't sell," Dr. Pratt says. Even if it does meet a need, if the sub-elements of marketing aren't in place - the promotion, price, and distribution, and others - the product will fail. In my old stomping grounds of medical devices, this became clear when ground-breaking new pacemakers and defibrillators were released, yet the predicted market share shifts never took place."
Those device products were much less successful than they could have been because of the better mousetrap paradigm, he says. Essentially, they were put into the marketplace with minimal clinical data - just enough to get the products approved - and some sales rep training. There were precious few approved claims to be made and even less sponsored postmarketing research to get any.
Customers' needs were considered in designing the product itself, just as pharma companies consider new indication needs/ better solutions in developing new drugs; but he says scant attention, if any at all, was paid to postmarketing elements of customers' needs.
"In the arena of clinical research, the epitome of the mousetrap paradigm is conducting an approval trial and then releasing the product with little or no follow-up," he says. "It is a rare product that sells itself, and most business leaders say no product does."
