Belief-Based Marketing: Anticipating, Not Just Analyzing Behavior

In pharmaceutical marketing, three industry/structural conditions have combined so that companies compete by outspending: the R&D monotony of chasing after the same targets in the same markets; monotony of information--using the same market and customer information to make identical prioritization decisions; and application monotony, in which regulatory oversight, consumer privacy issues and established industry practice cause marketers to create similar commercial programs against the same targets. Marketers can outsmart, rather than outspend, by exploiting the belief structures of physician or consumer targets, to develop differentially targeted and segment-tailored campaigns that greatly enhance ROI.