‘How else do we grow our ethical pharma business?’
Q: We found your March 30th column on “How do I grow my car dealership business?” provocative to say the least. We’re not in car dealership and not even in a related industry. But it was your business growing model revolving around your so-called “purchase system” that intrigued us.
We’re in the ethical pharma business. That means we’re marketing prescription drugs to doctors. One of our major concerns and it has been so over the past so many years is similar to that of the car dealer who asked for your Marketing Rx. That’s how to grow our ethical pharma business with doctors.
Your March 30th column was the topic of our executive lunch learning forum. It was there where our marketing VP proposed to us that we ought to explore our own model of a “purchase-system” based business growing. When asked how, our marketing VP was quick to tell us that first of all we ought not to be literal about the model. Instead of talking about “purchase system,” she said we should speak of our doctors’ “prescription system.”
Probed to tell us how to do that exploring, she could not get specific and instead just said: “Why don’t we ask Dr. Ned and Ardy?” And this is exactly what we’re doing.
A: We certainly agree with you that the business of car dealership of the couple who wrote us is different in both kind and scale from your prescription pharma business. The scale must be especially different.
We’re assuming that you can’t be in the prescription drug and marketing to doctors if you’re not big enough to have a med rep force of your own to detail to those doctors and a sales force either of your own or of your distributor to sell to drugstores.
But whether you’re as small as a car dealership or as large as a prescription drug company that can afford to have a regular “executive lunch learning forum,” you share the common problem of how to grow the business.
If you share a common problem, does it follow that you share the same “solution?” That’s the essence of your question.
More specifically, can you grow your prescription pharma business by tapping into the business growing opportunities in the “purchase system” model? We like the way your marketing VP relabeled that model as “prescription system.”
Because she was quickly able to appropriately rename the “purchase system” model, we’re not ready to say that your marketing VP “could not get into specific” about how exactly the “prescription system” can grow your business. We think she knows and must have said so but you’re writing to seek our Marketing Rx just to sort of validate what she probably said. Whether or not this is the truth, we still want to answer your question if only to demonstrate how powerful and insightful the concept of “prescription system” is.
So, in the ethical pharma business, what is the “prescription system” as a source of business growing? Let’s answer from the perspective of the doctor’s patient, for example, the case of the senior MRx-er. After his cardiac by-pass operation in 1994, his cardiologist prescribed a daily dosage of an anti-hypertension drug, an anti-cholesterol, an anti-thrombosis, and a diuretic. That was his “prescription system” and it’s the case for many others like him who were hypertensive. So here’s a large prescription market segment, a source for growing your ethical pharma business of “dream-like” proportion. It’s small as a segment population size but huge as a segment market size when you multiply it small population size by its 365 daily dosage frequency.
Today, the senior MRx-er is still taking his daily dosage of his “prescription system” although one or two of the drugs had been replaced with newer and supposedly better “next generation” medications. However, today another prescription system has been added. That’s because he now has Diabetes Type 2 that has to be managed with its own “prescription system.” So here is another just as large, if not larger prescription market segment, another just as big if not bigger source of growing your ethical pharma business that together with the preceding prescription system will make for a total source of business growing that is of, shall we say this time, “Titanic proportion” (but with the hope that the idea does not make your business sink).
Let’s now elaborate a little bit more how this set of prescription systems can become and be made the potent source for growing your ethical pharma business.
While many pharma companies may have most or even all the medications in an ailment’s prescription system, they usually don’t market and ethically promote them as a “system.”
And so you may have Glaxo promoting with cardiologists or GPs with cardio practice its anti-hypertension brand; Pfizer, its anti-cholesterol brand, Biomedis, its anti-thrombic brand, and Astra, its diuretic brand.
So one specific business growing strategy is to promote and market a “prescription system” pack. Actually, in dealing with the anti-TB market segment, that’s how pharma companies participating in this market segment are marketing and doing ethical promotion to pulmonologists and GPs with pulmo practice. So this precedent has already been set. It’s a matter of migrating the practice to the other unserved or underserved therapeutic segments.
But even if the marketing and ethical promo practice remains as in the hypertensive market segment, there still is some unserved or underserved business growing market segments there. You can uncover these by asking the question we asked in the car dealership case. Here’s the question as applied in your pharma setting: “In the prescription system you now know, what is/are the necessary and absolutely necessary products and services?” Let’s stay with our hypertension case.
The necessary or even absolutely necessary medication is low dose aspirin as anti-thrombotic.
So if you are Glaxo promoting your anti-hypertension or Pfizer promoting your anti-cholesterol, bring in your own low dose aspirin as “partner” drug to the anti-hypertension or the anti-cholesterol. That’s equivalent to a mini-prescription system that might just work with doctors as the smarter preparatory stage to the full-blown total prescription system strategy.
We’d like to end by saying again that you can find more market segment leads for business growing in the market segmentation models covered in the Senior MRx-er’s Segmenting book.
Keep your questions coming.Send them to us at [email protected] or [email protected]. God bless!
