Factors which influence recall of promotional visits and key messages in Romania: Proposed benchmarking practices

Abstract

This paper examines factors which influence pharmaceutical representative visit recall and key-message recall, based on real surveys conducted with Romanian GPs and specialists. Four detailing key performance indicators (KPIs) (spontaneous visit recall – top of mind and total mentions, total visit recall and key-message recall) are examined against six possible factors: time, product type, therapy area, medical specialty, locality size and period of spontaneous recall. Significant influences come from the period when the projects were conducted (year, semester, series of semesters), product type (original vs. generic) and therapy area / medical specialty. The latter confirm empirical observations that some types of products do indeed have a higher promotional impact (originals, “specialized” products). The influence of time implies that the current practice of benchmarking against average KPIs of recent surveys is irrelevant: one can find better or worse results depending not as much on one’s own promotional performance at the time, but on which semester one compares against, as well as which particular surveys were conducted during that semester. Four models of logistic regression are proposed instead, incorporating the influence of semester and product type. To our knowledge, this is the first investigation of factors of influence on visit and message recall KPIs, offering the business environment a more relevant choice than traditional benchmarking and enabling academia to understand and quantify the factors which influence the impact of detailing.