Pharma and Device Blog Watch

Sales Reps: PhRMA Guidelines Are a Negative (Pharmalot)
A poll conducted for Pharmaceutical Representative magazine showed that drug reps think their job is getting harder and harder, Ed Silverman writes. A sample of 205 respondents from companies such as GlaxoSmithKline, sanofi-aventis, Pfizer and Schering-Plough participated in the poll.  

Reps said the industry’s own PhRMA code governing interactions with doctors has made the most negative impact on their performance, according to the blog. “Of the sales reps, 46 percent chafe at the code, while 41 percent of the sales managers don’t like it. The American Medical Association’s Prescribing Data Restriction Program is a distant second, as nuisances go,” he writes.

The poll also showed the most important selling resource is samples, with reps estimating that half of the doctors wouldn’t see them if samples weren’t provided. “Not surprising, reps viewed as ‘sample suppliers’ are more likely than those viewed as ‘new information providers’ and ‘trusted colleagues’ to get less than one minute of time with a doc,” Silverman says.

Part of the reason reps have such limited time with doctors is there are too many competing reps, according to the poll. However, 40 percent said they expect their sales force to grow by 2009, Silverman says.

Negotiating Pfizer’s Lyrica Site Is a Pain (World of DTC Marketing)
Pfizer’s website for Lyrica is an example of a site overloaded with information that tries to be everything to everyone, Richard Meyer writes.

“The home page has so many different calls to action that it’s hard to know where to start, and as a result, website visitors may become frustrated and leave the site that is intended to help them,” he says. “It’s obvious that Pfizer did not do any user studies on this website and it shows.”

In internet marketing, website navigation should consider how a customer goes through his or her thought process when on the site, according to the blog. For segmented audiences, websites should have segmented home pages or secondary pages with different web navigation structures. “The Lyrica site ignores all these simple principles, and as thus, becomes a billboard for everything the brand wants you to know,” Meyer writes.

Apparently, Pfizer spent millions of dollars on a direct-to-consumer campaign and used the leftover funds to create the website without the testing and thought that went into its TV commercials, according to the blog. “Once again pharma spends millions of dollars to get people to a website that does not do the job of completing the questions customers have,” Meyer says.