Evidence based market research
Market research is easy to do badly.
You just list down all the things you want to know and then go and ask some doctors to tell you the answers.
For example, you want to know how much of a new brand you will sell. So, you go to some doctors, describe the brand and ask them how many patients they intend to put on the brand.
The problem is that the answers will be wildly inaccurate.
The error here is in confusing the research question (what you want to know) with the survey question (what you ask the doctor).
Inpharmation specialises in evidence based market research. If you have a research question, we can identify the survey question (and any modelling of the answers) that will provide you with the best answer. And we can quantify the likely noise and bias in the answers we get.
So, taking our new product forecast, doctors overestimate how much of a new product they will use. We know the mathematical transformation to remove that bias - and we know how much error (noise) remains after we have done that.
Often, however, better results can be achieved by not asking the obvious question. So, with our new product, we would get a more accurate forecast if we described our drug along side all the competing drugs and got doctors to rate how much they liked each drug. We can then do some simple modelling with these scores to transform them into market share estimates.
This is just a simple example. The point is that whatever you need to know, there is usually an evidence based approach that produces the best answer and this usually does not involve asking the obvious question.
To find out what the techniques are that will best answer your research questions, please fill out the form below...
