What is Pharmaceutical Marketing?

The pharmaceutical marketing is the application of techniques, customs, and tools typical of marketing for the promotion of cosmetic products, medical devices, or simply pharmaceutical products.

The first important thing to clarify is that pharmaceutical marketing activities can take place among different interlocutors.

It can occur on behalf of public or private organizations, and it can be directed at clinics, doctors, or directly to consumers.

Like several other sectors of marketing, which focus on much more specialized scenarios (such as political marketing), the pharmaceutical one also has its own unique characteristics.

Although this form of marketing is aimed at selling products, it must contend with the fact that in the common imagination, a pharmaceutical product is a necessity in terms of health.

Therefore, it cannot be reasoned with in the same terms as more traditional marketing (such as quality, convenience, values, etc...), since it is indeed a necessity, but with different characteristics.

How Pharmaceutical Marketing is Structured

Looking more closely at this type of marketing, we distinguish two types of relationships:

• Marketing towards Doctors: this mode of pharmaceutical marketing is based on intercepting the needs of professionals in the field, predominantly in terms of equipment and instrumentation, as well as the supply of medicinal products.
  
  In the vast majority of cases, marketing to doctors means having a direct nexus to a very extensive audience, which is represented by the doctor's patients. In a sense, the latter acts both as the buyer and the intermediary.
  
  Dealing with professionals, the product must be promoted and sponsored in a manner consistent with this professionalism: it must be accurately described and supported by data and elements of significant scientific relevance;
• Patient-targeted Marketing: this other form of marketing must be conducted in a radically different manner compared to that of a pharmaceutical company wishing to sell its product directly to a patient, without going through doctors.
  
  In this sense, pharmaceutical companies can base their marketing strategy on Search Analytics, which means consulting the data from searches that users conduct on the internet. A detail that nowadays carries significant weight.
  
  For example, numerous searches on symptoms and remedies for asthma could correspond to the promotion of a specific product aimed at meeting these needs.

Pharmaceutical Marketing and the Market

Similar to many other types of marketing, there are also various possibilities in terms of the relationship between product and market in pharmaceutical marketing.

Although somewhat dated, the Ansoff Matrix (also known as the Product-Market Growth Matrix), helps to better guide the marketing strategy depending on what kind of product you want to promote and where you want to promote it. This is very useful in trying to optimize results.

The Ansoff Matrix is a tool based on four elements:

• Existing market;
• New market;
• Existing product;
• New product.

Based on these elements, it is possible to develop four types of marketing strategies:

• Market penetration: that is, increasing sales of an existing product in an existing market;
• Market development: that is, entering with an existing product into a new market;
• Diversification: that is, introducing a new product into a new market;
• Product development: the launch of a new product in an existing market.

In an industry like the pharmaceutical one, where markets are full of products and where standing out is not so immediate, employing a well-thought-out strategy can make a difference.

In this, pharmaceutical marketing is not so different from other types of marketing.

In conclusion, we can say that although the pharmaceutical sector's approach to marketing strategies is relatively recent, it is already observable how many companies are rapidly adapting.

And they do so by investing substantial resources in marketing. Resources that are increasingly often greater than those allocated to the research and development of the products themselves.