Bio-Tech & Pharmaceuticals

For our biotechnology and pharmaceutical research, we often partner with the Graham Sjostrand Group, a consulting firm that provides strategic planning, marketing research, and business development support to a variety of clients across many segments of the medical technology and healthcare industry. Market Decisions brings knowledge in complicated data collection, advanced research methods and sophisticated analysis to the partnership. The Graham Sjostrand Group brings industry specific technical knowledge and marketing expertise.

We find that this work is among our most demanding for several reasons.

First, clients in this segment expect precise and completely reliable information. Here our rigorous interviewing protocols, interviewer training and the experience of our interviewers are highly valued.

Second, the sample or the respondents in a study are normally hard to find or hard to reach, whether they be physicians, specialists, medical technicians or patients with chronic conditions or diseases. We have proven methods to reach these respondents – and we normally do so with industry leading response rates.

Third, our technical skills in survey design and analysis provide more information from the data we collect. We can design our studies to allow conjoint analysis, cluster analysis or perceptual mapping. Each of these tools provides deeper insights into respondent perceptions, attitudes and behaviors than simple surveys. Even for simple surveys we can gain more information by using a proprietary method called trade off analysis to understand the depth of commitment to an attitude or belief.
We use the full gamut of research methods to serve this segment. This includes consumer and executive focus groups, executive interviewing, telephone surveys, mail surveys and web surveys. Often our research combines methods especially for hard to reach respondents where it is necessary to provide an optimally convenient data collection option.

Typical assignments have included:

• Conducting large sample chronic disease studies
• Managing a user panel for ongoing product feedback
• Fielding a consumer survey on a new biotechnology
• Conducting a mail survey of pharmacy practices
• Fielding a new pharmaceutical, conjoint study among medical specialists
• Conducting a survey of medical specialist services
• Surveying users to understand the opportunity for specialist technology