Analyzing the Effectiveness of Pharmaceutical Marketing Using Business Intelligence Methods

Pharmaceutical companies have traditionally marketed their products through a combination of several channels: sales details to physicians, direct-to-consumer advertising, professional medical journal advertising, sponsorship of meetings and events and e-promotion. With an impending patent cliff and subsequent loss in revenue, the industry must depend on, among many factors, recently launched products to offset the revenue loss. Coupled with increased generic competition, companies must evaluate the return on investment of their marketing dollars. This paper analyzes the effectiveness of traditional marketing methods, both industry-wide and for recently launched products, using the latest Business Intelligent methods. The dataset used in this paper is a sample of prescription, promotional, competitive, and product data from SDI Health. The analysis in this paper reveals that traditional marketing methods have a decreasing level of impact with the number of prescriptions dispensed, and describes new potential channels for marketing, as well as collecting and analyzing data to aid the industry improve its resource utilization.