Understanding consumer
preferences has always been of paramount importance in most product segments. Within
the pharmaceutical domain however even as there’s a constant ideation, speculation
on future of healthcare; outlook on disease incidence, burden and pharmaceutical
consumption patterns, this particular aspect has not been focused on, possibly owing
to the prescriptive nature of the medicine where decision-making seldom lies
with the patient & the power to influence product development lies more with
the medical professionals & payers. To an extent this disengagement of
consumer does justify the disinterest of Industry to understanding the consumer
as against understanding the prescriber & the payer/ insurer.
Having said that, a number of disorders these days are
getting close to being categorized as lifestyle-diseases & with early
detection, diagnosis and routine monitoring getting simpler, it’s only imminent
that the insurer will increasingly resort to rationalizing what
treatment-regimens can be covered thus significantly shifting the onus of
payment to consumer. Then again, owing to the abundance of open-source
information and availability of validated healthcare gamification apps, the
consumer is getting more knowledgeable & hence empowered. Seen together,
these trends indicate that the average pharmaceutical consumer is well poised to
be the key decision-maker on therapeutic choices, particularly on maintenance
therapies that form a predominant portion (vis-à-vis’
the curative therapies) of all pharmaceutical revenues.
It also hence would not be overtly speculative to state that
the hitherto quintessential practitioner-dependent healthcare consumer is
evolving quick & is looking at an iterative role for her/ him-self rather
than merely wanting to being ‘prescribed health’, literally & figuratively.
Continued negligence of factoring-in consumer behaviour in the product development
process can thus be a serious lapse of judgement in an industry that’s been
groping around for the next paradigm shift for a few years now.
The Health
2025 survey I floated in early July is a token attempt to gain some basic perspective
into the altering behaviour of an ‘aware pharmaceutical consumer’ which I hope
either in its promise OR in its inadequacy will instigate more such studies
in-depth and at a larger scale. While I can’t claim to have gotten a great
number of responses, I fortunately received quality responses (& some incidental endorsement*) as
indicated by consistency of the trend that was showing up right from early stages
to till plateauing of response flow.
Even as I was compiling the final results I came across this
rather well received fund raising pitch of Stefan Broda (Founder/CEO
of BeforeWeDo) at the end of which one particular GP lauded the Consumer Iteration built into the business model which is worth emulating by
other healthcare start-ups! – If not a sign from the heavens, a sweet
coincidence nonetheless.
SAMPLE POPULATION, STATISTICAL ASSUMPTIONS & SURVEY
DESIGN
I chose the sample population of pharmaceutical
professionals who I believe are very representative of the above breed of ‘aware
pharmaceutical consumers’ & to whom I have ready access through the Pharmaceutical Discussion Group I
founded and manage on Linkedin
& Groupsite.
Based on a guestimate of ~5million pharmaceutical
professionals world-wide, I derived my target sample size as 350, using a Confidence level of 95%, which is the
mostly used default level & a Confidence
interval of 5, which again is the oft-employed default figure. By the time
I chose to start the compilation (the
survey is still active) I however had only 159 responses which translated
amount to a confidence interval of 7.7
while the confidence level remains at 95%
- That, I guess is my cue to you for taking the results with a pinch of salt :-)
Finally, I am neither a professional statistician nor a
qualified analyst and it’s likely the design of survey may not fully please
many out there. I however did consciously try and keep the questionnaire short,
the questions specific & the choice of answers broad in order to minimize any
chance of a bias setting-in – the trends indicated by the responses, as I see,
justify some if not all questions.
PRESENTATION OF RESULTS, ANALYSIS
The survey is based on ten questions out of which the first
three are essentially filters namely age, sex & nationality that enable
some level of demographic segmentation of responses. While the charts of
responses to individual questions looked very pretty on Surveymonkey dash-board,
I agonized nonetheless quite a bit deciding on an ideal approach to presenting
the results on my blog without sounding too pedagogic – I hence chose to weave
the details around certain KEY OBSERVATIONS and then go about detailing on those
further.
Since it may help put things in perspective, I have uploaded
the primary results document* to file
cabinet on Pharmaceutical Discussion Group – please note that this link
opens the document only when you are logged in, (i.e. if not a member already, you will have to join the group)
**I’ll be
happy to share the master data file too with anyone interested.
KEY OBSERVATIONS
In hindsight I realize some of the questions are pretty skewed
& some fairly meaningful, but overall they seemed to fall in two broad
categories, one set wherein the standalone overall response is itself strongly indicative
of a trend & a second set wherein an interesting picture emerges only when
the responses are separated out and compared across demographics. I however
will spare the mundane trends and go straight to top observations based on the
percentage response towards a trend-indicating response;
I.
Not just food, Ambrosia
is what the consumer wants - a huge thumbs-up for Functional Foods!
Quite ironic that the top trend in a health survey is food
& not medicine! - A whopping 87% of the respondents see/ want the food in 2025
to be more than nutrition, out of which 46% see a potential for food being a curative!
Women make up the majority of the ‘food as a curative’
advocates (60% as against 30% among men) – which simultaneously underscores
& endorses the greater influence of women in the functional food promise.
More Indians (56%) believe in the promise of curative food
than the North Americans (40%) or Europeans (44%) – a possible connection to
the expectations influenced by prevailing, predominant ethno-cultural dietary
practises?
II.
Consumers want to
take things into their hands, literally – Mobile Health Tools all set to Rule
At 68%, a clear
majority of the respondents are bullish on the role & significance of
personal mobile apps in an individual’s health management. (25%, Indispensable
& 43%, Very crucial)
Once again this is a trend driven primarily by women, the percentage
of women who chose ‘Indispensable’ (40%) being significantly higher than the men,
a majority of whom (67%) chose the mildly-tempered but still bullish, ‘Very
crucial’ as their answer. This clearly establishes women as the ‘early adaptors
of the health mobile tools & apps’ & possibly that mobile apps are more
amenable to woman’s health management and finally that factoring-in gender into
the development of a mobile healthcare app can be a key determiner of the
success of the same.
When the Geography filter is applied, the trend expectedly peaks in North America with an overall bullish-ness
at 76% - within which women once again stand-out strongly with 55% responding ‘Indispensable’.
The dominant European response is however ‘Very crucial’ (60%) which probably indicates
a currently lower penetration of mobile health apps within this geography –
this holds good for India too.
III.
They seem to say, keep
the Doctor away – Eating an apple isn't the only way
While the question has some unfortunate bias & choice of
‘You’ sounds like a given…, the responses still indicate an increasing role for
non-physician health professionals. If the choice of ‘You’ (53%) is ignored, only 12% see the
physician playing the single most crucial role towards an individual’s health
much below the diagnostician at 18%.
There’s an interesting contrast in choice of physician v/s
diagnostician among the female & male respondents’ viz., Female: 7% (P) v/s
21% (D) & Male: 14% (P) v/s 16% (D) – probably again owing to the essential
nature of women’s health issues vis-à-vis’ male issues – nonetheless, a
potentially important alert to the healthcare industry.
In-line with the number one trend above, the nutritionist
polled 10% of the vote. Quite surprisingly, of all respondents who chose
Nutritionist, 70% belong to the age group of 35-44 yrs. This read together with
the first trend gives a great demographic insight into who could be the prime target
demographic segment for promoting functional foods – Women between the age
group of 35-44.
NOT-SO-KEY OBSERVATIONS
Apart from the above three observations, the rest of the
observations though interesting aren’t necessarily great insights into the health
consumer psyche - the same are listed below in no specific order;
- 78% of
the respondents feel medicines should target cure as against 22% that are okay
with maintenance – expectedly, the 78% group is populated majorly with
people under 55 years of age.
- 87% of the respondents prefer oral medications
to parenterals – Interestingly though, there’s a strong geographical variation
with NA & EU preferring oral medications at 92%, while the Indian
respondents still retain some of the cultural trust of ‘injections’ (26%)
- 89% of all respondents still believe the
necessity of medicines per se’ in-spite or despite the preference of the
ambrosial foods – if anything, this seems to showcase the omnipresence of the
pills.
While the results may not qualify as astonishing findings, the unmistakable relevance of the trends thrown up by a mere seven-question survey
still underscores the value of understanding the health consumer’s perspective
and using the knowledge to build, refine the road-map of pharmaceutical product
development.
Functional Food
for thought! :-)
As someone who routinely wears boots under Levi’s 511s, I understand
the sheer utility of those small loops called bootstraps - Sramana Mitra’s high
focus on an entrepreneur bootstrapping the start-up in her book “Seed India -How To Navigate the Seed Capital Gap In India (Entrepreneur Journeys)” helped
me appreciate the criticality of this aspect in the Indian venture funding
context.
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