Effectiveness of Integrated Marketing Communications Strategy for Prescription Drugs - Viewpoint of Physicians

• Main Authors: Hua-Ming Liu, 劉樺明
• Other Authors: Ming-Chih Tsai
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2015
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/67147738384248028135

碩士 === 國立中興大學 === 高階經理人碩士在職專班 === 103 === With the advent of an aging society, people increasingly demand for the health care and medical treatment and require better quality of life relatively, and this trend indirectly promotes the vigorous development of the pharmaceutical market. In which prescription drugs alone accounted for eighty percent of the global pharmaceutical markets. All major pharmaceutical companies were consequently covetous of these big opportunities and made the market of prescription drugs to be such a competitive battleground. Moreover, the Taiwan prescription drugs are mainly for Taiwan National Health Insurance Administration and the drug payment accounted for a quarter of the total National Health Insurance expenditure. To solve these recent financial problems in National Health Insurance system, Taiwan government implemented a series of cost-down policies. Coupled with peer competition, Taiwan pharmaceutical industry is facing unprecedented operational difficulties and challenges; how to select more effective marketing tools and strategies to expand the current market, accordingly, has become one of the critical issues. In accordance with Taiwan regulation, prescription drugs much be taken and purchased after physicians’ professional diagnosis so that the physicians play key decision-making roles and are targeted mostly by the marketing and promotion strategies of the prescription drugs sales. How to effectively transform the marketing communication strategies to promote the drugs to be accepted by the physicians becomes the most emphasis part in every pharmaceutical company. This research, for all these reasons, aims to take the physicians’ perspectives to explore the effectiveness of the integrated marketing communication strategies in the market of prescription drugs and to understand the different acceptance levels by different physicians’ characteristics further. This study used designed questionnaires through face-to-face interview and site fill-in delivered 202 valid survey copies. After the statistical method tests, it comes to the following conclusions: A) the integrated marketing communication strategies would affect physicians’ prescribing behaviors, which are the marketing communication models from the pharmaceutical companies, including advertising, sales promotion, event marketing, personal selling, and word-of-mouth. Indeed, all have impact on the physicians’ prescribing practices. B) the physician’s characteristics, such as gender, age, position, practice areas, professional divisions, and job levels, have influence on the integrated marketing communication strategies differently.