Segmenting generic medicines’ market,using physicians’ attitudes and generic companies’ prescription span as grouping criteria

Abstract

With this quantitative research, we made an attempt to investigate physicians’ prescribing decision-making characteristics and generic medicines’ favorability. Specifically, we investigated physicians’ attitudes toward: (a) generic medicine companies brands, (b) generic medicines companies’ communications, (c) physician-prescribing criteria, (d) key success factors that may increase generic medicines’ prescriptions and (e) potential generic medicines’ deficits. Moreover, we searched for significant differences among the research participants’ responses, in order to categorize them into meaningful groups. To this end, we addressed to a random sample of 250 physicians, which yielded a 42.4% response rate. The study involved extensive literature review and augmented quantitative data analysis, comprising reliability assessment and cluster analysis, among others. Research findings indicated participants clustering into three segments, that is, Generic Advocates, Generic Slacks and Generic Skeptics, reflecting distinct physician prescribing decision-making archetypes, with distinct prescribing criteria, favorability on various companies’ communication policies and prescribing behavior. The implication is that generic pharmaceutical companies may use the proposed physician segmentation in order to match their marketing strategies with the respective physician’s archetypes, regarded as generics’ purchasing decision-making actors. The paper also discusses research limitations and directions for future research.