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09 JANUARY 2018

How Market Research helps to study the markets for Healthcare products and services?

In general, the purchase of majority of the healthcare products and services are not optional unlike other consumer products and services. However, it doesn’t translate that the potential consumer must have to buy the product whatever a brand is selling. Thus, it will become necessary to answer number of questions in order to grow and maintain a healthy business in any market.

Any healthcare market primarily having the following stake holders:

Pharmaceutical companies (Regional and Multi-national brands)

Medical device manufacturers / supplies and equipment businesses which constitutes manufacturers, distributors and dealers

Primary and Secondary Care facilities and service providers (e.g. hospitals and nursing homes)

Healthcare service providers (e.g. doctors, nurses, pharmacists)

Potential patients who consumes products and services provided by any of the above

There are three steps to be followed while conducting market research study for a healthcare service or a pharmaceutical product.

1. Step–1: Addressing the following basic questions.

What are the objectives of the study?

• Which are the markets have to be studied? (e.g. global, national or regional)
• Who are the target group?(Patients or other Stake holders)
• What our competition is planning to do? (Service Providers or Product / Service brands or Key players in the market)

What is market landscape?

• What is total market size? Which are the key segments? What are the trends?
• Who are the major players and competitors? Where they are exactly located?
• How the supply chain organized and distribution is channelized?

Who are the right and potential target customers, and what are the characteristics of potential customer which we wish to hear from?

• Is the consumer by self a decision maker as well as the buyer? Or do any other stakeholder playing a key role on influencing over purchase (such as doctors, family members including spouses, parents)?
• What are the purchases which are influenced by others? (for example – drugs on prescription or non-prescription, vitamins and nutritional food supplements)
• Are the potential customers having any unique demographics of interest (it could be their children or senior citizens, gender specific or specific on medications or diseases)?

2. Step–2: Addressing the following other key questions

How the image of the brand or business is perceived which would prove the reputation of the brand?

• Perception towards the substitutes for the product or service?

What are motivators which are motivating the customer to purchase the product / service?

• What is the frequency of purchase? Is it once or repetitive to understand the purchase behaviour by knowing the likelihood?

Does the messages communicated by the brand or business is effective?

• How often they see the messages and other communications from the brand or business? Where they are seeing? (For example, in Television, smartphones, magazines, at hospital, doctor’s clinic, on Internet, etc.,)

3. Stage-3: To decide the methods and tools to conduct the market research study.

This stage is the most crucial stage as it is going to drive the entire research. Choosing methods are more critical as majority of the Pharmaceutical and Healthcare market research studies involves sensitive and more personalized information when it comes to B2C studies and even more complex when it comes to B2B platform due to competition’s business interest.

Especially, when it comes to India, daunting challenges are ahead due legal, multiple vernacular languages, physical locations, and diversified cultural barriers.

However, at Arrow Point carrying our strong past experience to conduct complex Healthcare and Pharmaceutical market research studies in a complex market like India, we formulate different effective research strategies to overcome all these challenges especially in data collection which includes all kinds of modes, tools and methods. As our international client inquiries extends from USA (United States of America), UK (United Kingdom), Germany, France, Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, Portugal, Denmark, Middle East and North Africa (Bahrain, Israel, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates) across globe, we use state-of-art methods by following international standards in every stage of research.

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