Moving Beyond Market Share

Drug companies measure product success with market share--a measure appropriate to the one-time purchase of consumer goods, or even acute care drugs, but one that is increasingly irrelevant and, more important, misleading, for chronic care medicines. Market share largely measures new scrips and thus 80% of companies' promotional spending is aimed at convincing doctors to prescribe a drug--though in fact 80% of the economic value of a drug (and a similar percentage of its medical value) depends on patient behavior, in particularly getting and taking refills, which companies largely ignore. Companies need to adopt very different marketing strategies--and to start by measuring success differently, through metrics like persistence and intensity of product use.