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B2Bmm In Pharma Industry - Cmarc Case

Business to Business Marketing Management
(B2BMM)

Unique Marketing Challenges in the Pharmaceutical Sector

And the B2B Gem - C MARCTM
Introduction

Given the nature of health care product needs and requirements, the geography-specific government regulations, the scope for achieving competitive advantage through IPR protection of drugs and the relatively passive consumption patterns of the end customers, the pharmaceuticals industry poses unique challenges and opportunities in the realm of business to business marketing.

This paper first studies the pharmaceutical industry in general for common principles, practices and opportunities in B2B marketing. The paper then goes on to choose a company in the pharmaceutical sector which has distinguished itself from the rest by its unique approach to market research and customer relationship management and highlights its practices in pharmaceutical B2B marketing.

The context of the study is limited to the Indian Pharmaceutical Industry; however, most of the concepts examined apply globally. No attempt is made to draw out any India-specific practices with a view to highlight possible distinctions.

The pharmaceutical sector bears a remarkable similarity with the computer software products industry in that the investments in R&D activities constitute the Lion’s share of the total costs; once a product is ready to sell, the end product is replicable and the incremental cost of producing each unit is negligibly small. This leads to the problem of rampant availability of counterfeit drugs of all major labels, which is as detrimental to the interests of pharmaceutical manufacturing companies as is the unrestrained piracy of software products to the corresponding software companies. Perhaps much more, as the poor quality of counterfeit drugs may cause serious health hazards to end customers.

While the US and European pharmaceutical industry grew by 6% in 2008, the Asian and Indian growth has been in double...