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ZIMENT ANNOUNCES DEMAND CALIBRATION: A NEW TECHNIQUE TO IMPROVE PHARMACEUTICAL PRODUCT FORECASTING

New York, May 06, 2004: Ziment, a global healthcare and pharmaceutical market research consultancy headquartered in New York, has introduced demand calibration, a research technique for pharmaceutical manufacturers that dramatically improves the accuracy of the primary marketing research used to help build sales and manufacturing forecasts. The new technique will allow for the proper input of customer demand into these forecasts, historically a weak point in the process.

“Primary marketing research measuring customer reaction to new product concepts has always been used to drive sales forecasts,” says the company’s CEO, Howard Ziment. “The problem is well known—physicians overstate their intent to prescribe a new product; patients overstate their intent to ask their doctor about a new product. No one has ever been able to properly adjust for this overstatement. The industry has historically used simple rules of thumb like ‘divide by 2 or divide by 3’ because it was the only solution available. Demand calibration solves this age old problem by providing a more rigorous means to adjust the overstatement.”

Demand calibration is an algorithm that properly adjusts what is called preference share, the extent to which customers say they will prescribe or use a new product, to a better representation of what will be their actual prescription or use of the product. The algorithm was developed by examining Ziment’s primary research study database formed over 20 years, and comparing preference shares from these studies to the actual performance, in market, of the products that were researched.

“Ziment is perfectly positioned to be the one to bring this major advance to research based forecasting inputs,” says John Tapper, Chief Methodologist at Ziment. “We have the data from over 20 years of conducting the type of concept and modeling research that is used to feed our client’s forecasting models. The algorithm has been formed based on over 15,000 respondents, across 25 disease states, with preference shares from studies ranging from 1% to 67%, spanning virtually all of the major pharmaceutical manufacturers in the world. It takes this depth and breadth to have developed an algorithm that can be applied universally.”

The demand calibration technique has been incorporated into many of Ziment’s “Compound-to-Profit” marketing and research approaches (for more, go to www.ziment.com) that involves new product or new indication concept evaluations. Chief amongst them is Ziment’s TRIALZ approach, designed to show pharmaceutical companies the optimal product profile and clinical trial configuration to maximize the commercial potential of compounds that they are developing.

Ziment is a full-service healthcare and pharmaceutical market research consultancy offering custom marketing research worldwide. It is the global healthcare research brand for The Kantar Group, the Information and Consultancy Division of WPP, plc.

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