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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 12834

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

 

Publication type: news

Online pharma market research continues to increase
PM Live 2008 Feb 14
http://www.pmlive.com/index.cfm?showArticle=1&ArticleID=6481


Full text:

Internet-based market research is a growing trend in pharma, and one that looks set to grow, according to the 2007 Medefield Pharmaceutical Market Research Trends Study, which was released yesterday (February 14).

According to the study, online market research is now conducted three times more than telephone interviews and nearly four times as often as face-to-face meetings.

There was also an increase in 2007 in the global spread of online research, with Eastern Europe and parts of Asia and Latin America gradually, although they are still far behind the US and Western Europe.

“What we’re seeing is that market researchers have grown more ambitious. They still want their studies to be time efficient, cost effective and capable of producing high quality data. But they’re designing more complex studies with higher goals, aimed at reaching more doctors ‹ geographically and within a cross-section of specialties ‹ and yielding information that’s really solid. What’s more, the researchers want to do all this within their pre-approved budgets and deadline,” said Johanne Guarda, senior vice president of Medefield America.

Researchers now report internet experience in Brazil (9 per cent) and Japan (6 per cent), two countries that had previously been thought too remote for large-scale online studies.

Online access to market research has steadily increased according to previous Medefield studies, but the increase in 2007 of 43 per cent showed a sharper curve than in any of the previous years.

The use of face-to-face and telephone research has sharply declined, with face-to-face falling 28 per cent and telephone interviews dropping 41 per cent since 2006. There was a clear correlation between previous experience with the internet and an increased comfort level, resulting in a higher expectation of quality and access to a large cross-section of doctors.

The switch to online market research is partly down to cutting costs. However, according to Medefield, the same market researchers who chose the online methodology in the first place – generally for its cost-effectiveness – are now using it so much that they are spending more.

More than 20 global pharma and biotech companies were involved in the study, including AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Wyeth, Novartis, Roche and Bristol-Myers Squibb. Online interviews were conducted with 163 market research and business intelligence professionals.

 

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909