Strategic Market Segmentation: An Opportunity to Integrate Medical and Marketing Activities

Abstract

While top executives in the pharmaceutical industry often advocate being market oriented and customer focused, we have found that few companies (large or small) use market segmentation to its maximum potential. Against the backdrop of an evermore demanding marketplace and many advances in strategic marketing planning technology, a majority of pharmaceutical companies still base their product development and commercialisation plans on cursory, incomplete, or intuitive marketing analysis with the resultant marketing strategy, missing fundamental opportunities and delivering incomplete or inappropriate strategies. Such a lack of rigour may be explained by a number of factors: need to reduce time to market, reducing levels of expertise in marketing, a less than optimal medical marketing interface, and the poor or ineffective leverage of information.

Used effectively, strategic market segmentation can provide a point of consensus for all stakeholders and a more robust foundation for creating advantage(s) that will lead to increasing sales and improving overall marketing performance. Strategic market segmentation is necessary to provide a commercial orientation to product development right from the earliest stages of the drug discovery process. It leads to creative advantage, and improved resource allocation and decision making because it enables the company to be customer-facing and to reflect this in the approach to development and marketing of the drug.