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NEW MARKET RESEARCH TOOL WILL RADICALLY CHANGE HOW PHARMACEUTICAL COMPANIES SELL PRESCRIPTION DRUGS TO PHYSICIANS

New York, March 05, 2004: Ziment, a healthcare and pharmaceutical market research consultancy headquartered in New York, announced today that it has developed an approach to physician segmentation research that will change the way companies market their products to physicians.

This approach, called TAGZ, is an important development for pharmaceutical marketers conducting segmentation research because it takes a physician’s combined psychographic and attitudinal data for a prescription drug and links it to their historical prescribing behavior through a proprietary algorithm.

This means that physicians in a company’s call deck that were not included in the original segment research can still be identified or “tagged” as to their segment membership by Ziment’s algorithm and its system of data-mining and modeling techniques.

“For the first time companies can actually use the results of physician segmentation research, making the entire process palpable again and opening a brand new chapter on how we can micro-market to physicians,” says the company’s CEO, Howard Ziment.

“Many companies have shied away from attitudinal-based segmentation research because the results were simply not actionable. But now, with TAGZ, they are, and that puts a whole new light on the value of primary segmentation research,” said Ziment.

Currently a sales representative’s call deck includes typically includes information such as the physician’s specialty, whether or not a physician is a high writer of prescriptions and other behaviorally based definitions.

“With TAGZ, reps now have a pre-determined segment identifier that links to a wealth of knowledge about the physician, including their attitudinal disposition towards the market as well as to the drug itself. Sales collateral and detail pieces can now be designed specifically by segment since reps will know what pieces to use with each physician. It really makes it a whole new ballgame for pharmaceutical marketing and sales,” Ziment said.

Ziment’s chief methodologist, John Tapper, said that recent software developments and the company’s use of the latest data mining and modeling techniques to create the segmentation solutions and do the complex calculations that give market researchers an edge.

“The objective for creating the new algorithm was to eliminate the need for pharmaceutical companies to conduct expensive qualifying tests,” said Tapper. “The problem has always been how to act on the psychographic data that emerges from the segmentation research. Qualifiers such as check studies were always the norm and they tended to be expensive and prone to poor response rates. Now there is a solution,” he said.

How Segmentation Research Works

Segmentation research is conducted to maximize a drug’s ROI by identifying key groups in a target market that will be most responsive to marketing efforts.

With respect to the marketing of pharmaceuticals to physicians, this type of marketing research is presently carried out by first conducting extensive qualitative research to determine the, attitudes and needs that truly drive prescribing of a product, the accompanying behaviors, etc. This is followed by an extensive quantification of this information to allow for sophisticated multivariate analyses to uncover possible factors that divide a market.

The data collected from this second quantitative phase often includes attitudes, perceptions, and psychographic information. This data is then analyzed against dependant variables (that is, desired behaviors) to identify patterns and form segment groups.

Ziment’s TAGZ approach is an add-on to its PHYSICIAN SEGZ product, which is part of the company’s COMPOUND-to-PROFIT group of research services.

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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