It Must Be The Free Samples
The pursuit of persistence
By James Chase Medical Marketing & Media October 01, 2007
This essay, written from the perspective of pharmaceutical marketing, is interesting for a number of reasons.
First, it’s refreshing to see a blatant lamentation about the difficulty of improving persistence arising from this industrial sector which is usually the source of copy that, at a minimum, implicitly describes pharma-sponsored compliance programs as successful.
Second, I’m impressed that a single sentence from the article accurately summarizes the experience of marketers and clinical researchers alike, Marketers believe there is an answer [to the problem of poor compliance and impaired persistence], but have yet to execute anything on a scale big enough to move the needle.
And I like the trend analysis:
Finally, the author demonstrates that, while there may be nothing new under the sun, there is apparently a thing or two that, if they are under the sun, have avoided my notice – in this case, it’s the possibility that free samples of meds may have a negative effect on persistence.
Not too shabby for less than a page of prose.
I would add only my usual refrain – that perhaps, to use the author’s words, the reason marketers and researchers “have yet to execute anything on a scale big enough to move the needle” is because they are looking for a solution that doesn’t exist. Again appropriating the language of the article, just because “marketers believe there is an answer” (and one could add researchers and clinicians to that wishful list) doesn’t mean one exists any more than the conviction held by explorers like Columbus that there was a navigational short cut from Europe to the Far East didn’t mean one existed. If our current concept of compliance is flawed, searches for the forces that influence compliance are unlikely to prove pragmatically successful.