Healthy Skepticism Library item: 9267
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
Hensley S.
Pharma Box Office: Sales Force Shifts
Wall Street Journal Health Blog 2007 Apr 5
http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2007/04/05/pharma-box-office-sales-force-shifts/
Full text:
Sales reps, the foot soldiers in Big Pharma’s battle for prescriptions, have come under an unwelcome spotlight as more doctors complain about their intrusions and corporate cost-cutters trim budgets on their backs.
Pfizer made waves last year by announcing it would cut some 2,200 positions, about 20% of its U.S. sales force. Abbott Laboratories, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Johnson & Johnson have also scaled back on sales. It’s no coincidence that the pullbacks have come as some as these companies have lost patent protection for big drugs that had been the calling cards for many of the reps.
How’s it going in the field these days? The Health Blog checked in with ImpactRx in Mt. Laurel, N.J., which monitors Big Pharma’s selling to doctors. The company runs a doctor-office equivalent of the Nielsen ratings to collect information on what drug reps are talking about. These anonymous doctors, all heavy prescribers and therefore the prime targets of drug makers, record their interactions with sales reps on smart phones. The data get sent to ImpactRx every day.
The data from ImpactRx show a roughly 10% drop in the number of discussions of drugs with physicians (”details” in industry parlance) during the first quarter of this year compared with the same period in 2006. “We’ve seen a decline in the number of details across the board,” says Patrick Angelastro, a senior vice president at ImpactRx.
As the companies jockey for the hearts and minds of doctors, marketers zero in on “share of attention” to measure how well they’re doing. It’s a zero-sum game that adds to 100%, so if one company’s slice of doctors’ time is up another’s must be down. On that basis, Angelastro tells the Health Blog, a few of the biggest companies have traded share points, driven in large part by a few product launches and some losses of big drugs to generic status.
“We’ve seen a change in the players,” says Gary Manko, an internist and president of Clinical Associates, a 60-doctor group practice based in Towson, Md. “Pfizer is not nearly as big a presence as it once was,” he tells the Health Blog. “We see a lot of Novartis these days.”
Here’s a look at some of the biggest shifts in the share of primary care doctors’ attention, according to ImpactRx.
Pfizer has been the loser, shedding 1.5 percentage points of “attention share” in the last year. Now at 9.0% total share, Pfizer was hurt by the loss of antidepressant Zoloft, which went generic last summer, and has slipped to No. 2 among drug makers in the past year. GlaxoSmithKline, the new No. 1, was up a fraction of a percentage point to 10.8% share in the first quarter of 2007.
Sanofi-Aventis lost 1.0 percentage point of attention share in the first quarter compared with the year-ago period. Safety concerns around Ketek, the company’s troubled antibiotic, contributed to the drop. The company’s share of attention stood at 6.5% in the first quarter of this year.
Novartis was the biggest gainer in the past year, climbing 1.8 percentage points to 8.7% share in the first quarter. The company’s blood pressure pills Lotrel and Diovan together accounted for more than half the company’s discussions with doctors in the quarter. Novartis hired more reps in anticipation of the launches of diabetes pill Galvus, delayed at FDA, and for Tekturna, a new blood pressure medicine, just approved by the agency.
Merck was another winner, gaining 1.5 percentage points to 8.6% share in the first quarter. The new diabetes pill Januvia accounted for more than a quarter of the company’s details to primary care doctors during the last six months.
