In a wrap-up of the recent European Pharmaceutical Market Research Association (EphMRA) conference in Malta, Peter Winters of Brand Health International nicely (and quite entertainingly) summarized some of the take-home messages from a workshop on pharmaceutical forecasting mistakes and how to avoid them that were presented by Gary Johnson of Inpharmation and Alec Finnery of AstraZeneca.
Winters says “the most thought-provoking lesson from the course” is how forecasters tend to be skeptical about the relevance of particular events. In their personal lives, he says, forecasters are as likely as the next bloke to be upset by an individual event. But for questions in their professional lives, he reports, they consider the very big picture.
“Sometimes this is counterintuitive in terms of how we develop evidence for an argument,” he writes.
When considering the likely market share a drug will get according to market entry order, Winters reports that Johnson argued that the pattern, on average, follows Zipf’s Law (an empirical distribution, originally derived from studies of natural language development where the frequency of any word is roughly inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table).
When participants questioned the strong performance of second-to-market drugs like Zantac and Singulair, , in that light, Johnson warned forecasters against being “misled by exception.”
The follow through
Finney stressed the importance of good inter-personal skills in order to achieve internal buy-in to a forecast, Winters reports. Otherwise, many technically savvy forecasts are ignored, he noted.
And once a forecast is accepted, forecasters need judgment and resolve to make sure their forecast is used to make the best business decisions possible, Finney says.
Quite a load, at first glance, but a forecast is truly a means to end – not an end in itself. So without the follow-through, we may be in danger of letting it become little more than an exercise in futility.
Access the conference wrap-up at (www.ephrma.org).
Author: Lisa Roner, editor, theforecaster
