An exciting new year for IJPHM

Citation

Mukherjee, A. (2008), "An exciting new year for IJPHM", International Journal of Pharmaceutical and Healthcare Marketing, Vol. 2 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijphm.2008.32402aaa.001

An exciting new year for IJPHM

Article Type: Editorial From: International Journal of Pharmaceutical and Healthcare Marketing, Volume 2, Issue 1.

An exciting new year for IJPHM

I begin this editorial paper with a quote from Berry and Bendapudi's (2007, p. 111) recent Journal of Service Research article, where they say:

Health care is an enormously expensive, highly complex, universally used service that significantly affects economies and the quality of daily living. Service management, operations, and marketing scholars have much to offer to a critically important, intellectually challenging, but deeply troubled health care service sector.

This comment precisely underscores the importance of the genesis and rapid growth of the International Journal of Pharmaceutical and Healthcare Marketing. Since, its launch, the journal has received increasingly warm acceptance by scholars and practitioners in this area. Usage statistics reflected in the online download frequencies of IJPHM papers recently compiled by Emerald shows an enviable total of 4,245 downloads for the top 20 articles of IJPHM in 2007.

As we step into the second year of the International Journal of Pharmaceutical and Healthcare Marketing, several exciting opportunities have emerged. First, IJPHM will be featured in “Meet the Editors” sessions in some well-known conferences in 2008, such as the Business and Health Administration Association Conference in Chicago, Association of Collegiate Marketing Educators Conference in Houston, Society for Marketing Advances Conference in Florida, and the International Conference on Health Care Systems in Wisconsin. Second, the Editorial Board has been re-organized. A warm welcome to the new Associate Editor, Dr Mary Beth Pinto of Penn State and to the new Book Review Editor, Dr Vivek Natarajan of Lamar University. Special thanks to the outgoing Associate Editor, Professor Angus Laing and the outgoing Book Review Editor, Dr Hong Wei He. Both of them will, of course, continue to serve on the Editorial Board of the journal. Few more renowned scholars have also agreed to join the Editorial Board of the journal. Further, we will soon announce the most outstanding paper and the highly commended papers for 2007.

As I mentioned in my last editorial paper in the fourth issue of 2007 (Mukherjee, 2007), IJPHM aims to foster an interdisciplinary scholarly dialogue that would potentially strengthen the foundations of Pharmaceutical and Healthcare Marketing as a discipline. In line with this spirit, we present five interesting articles in this issue which collectively strive to broaden the scope of the discipline.

The issue begins with an paper by Moschis and Friend of Georgia State University, who use data from two large-scale national studies conducted by their Center for Mature Consumer Studies to segment the mature consumer market (55-and-older) into four gerontographic segments (healthy hermits, healthy indulgers, ailing outgoers, and frail recluses) and identify the preferences and usage patterns of health care products and services for each segment. This study adds to the growing literature on gerontographics, which is increasingly more suited to the marketing strategies of health care companies compared to demographics or psychographics alone.

The second paper by Chandra, Durand, and Weaver addresses a new “hot” topic in healthcare biometrics. To date, there has been very little empirical research on attitudes towards biometrics in healthcare. The authors explore this emerging issue by conducting a survey on a sample of health care consumers (men and women from varying age groups and racial and educational backgrounds) as well as healthcare providers (physicians, nurses, and allied health professionals) to uncover their attitudes towards adoption of biometrics. The study shows that healthcare providers are more accepting of biometric technologies and have more differentiated feelings about their potential uses and limitations than consumers. However, both providers and consumers were equally concerned about privacy issues and the need for information limits.

This is followed by an insightful paper by Gurumurthy Kalyanaram on the effect of order of market entry on market share in prescription (Rx) and over-the-counter (OTC) pharmaceutical drugs market. Estimating a log-log statistical model using OLS methodology on data collected from secondary sources, the author demonstrates that there is a significant order of entry effect on market share in both prescription and OTC drugs categories. This effect is higher in magnitude in the OTC category than in the Rx category. The effects of price, and direct-to-physician (DTP) and direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising are also significant. The finding on the differential effects of DTP and DTC advertising in the prescription and OTC categories is a major contribution of this paper.

In the fourth paper of the issue, Baalbaki, Ahmed, Pashtenko and Makarem demonstrate the importance of hospital secondary support functions in long-term strategy development and growth. Based on a sample of 315 patients in Beirut, Lebanon, the authors use stepwise regression and other statistical analyses to test eight hypotheses. Results show that the acts that influence overall customer/patient satisfaction with the medical service encounter in the emergency setting are nursing care, physicians, admission, and technicians, in that order of importance.

The fifth paper in this issue is an interesting case study authored by Herstein, Mitki and Jaffe on the integrated marketing communications strategy employed by the Israel Cancer Association. Moving from a corporate identity based on monolithic approach to an endorsed corporate identity strategy and espousing the integrated marketing communication philosophy, the Israel Cancer Association was able to improve consumer perceptions, attitudes and behavior towards breast cancer. The promotion strategy in the fight against breast cancer was organized along three areas research promotion, prevention and early detection, rehabilitation methods and improving treatment across three levels of activities: micro, sector, and macro. This marketing approach serves as a benchmark and has increasingly become the modus operandi of cancer associations throughout the world.

Finally, we have a review on Porter and Teisberg's book Redefining Health Care: Creating Value-based Competition on Results.

I take the opportunity to express my appreciation to all the contributors, reviewers, and editorial board members. I hope you will enjoy reading the papers.

Avinandan Mukherjee

References

Berry, L.L. and Bendapudi, N. (2007), “Health care: a fertile field for service research”, Journal of Service Research, Vol. 10 No. 2, pp. 111-22.

Mukherjee, A. (2007), “Looking back at the first year of IJPHM”, International Journal of Pharmaceutical and Healthcare Marketing, Vol. 1 No. 4, pp. 273-5.