SSRI CHINA news

On October 23^rd and 24^th, CMRA (China Marketing Research Association) held their 8^th China’s Marketing and Market Research Summit in Shanghai with nearly 450 in attendance. The theme of this year’s Summit was “Integration and Symbiosis”. “Integration” means integrating industry resources and optimizing industry service structure; “symbiosis” means mutual benefit and symbiosis with customers, deepening the industrial chain and building a harmonious ecosystem of the industry. The summit invited experts from the government statistics department, famous domestic sociologists, economists, marketing experts, academics, professors, corporate clients and representatives, and international and domestic experts and practitioners in the market research industry. (Excerpt from CMRA website)

Jane Zhang from SSRI CHINA was one of the experts at the Summit and did a presentation about how to better understand the healthcare market by utilizing and integrating / combining various resources and methods, such as secondary data, large scale market research data and ad-hoc research. She spoke about the four key aspects in which we consider to be important in understanding the market – market size, market concentration, unmet medical needs and sales rep coverage.

For market size, she used diabetes as an example, and compared the data from a nationally representative survey on diabetes (which suggest that there are 47.75 million diabetes patients undergoing treatment) with the estimated number of diabetes patients from PatiensMap (48.1 million) and mentioned the importance of comparing several data sources to get a more accurate picture of the market size. For market concentration, unmet medical needs and sales rep coverage, she mentioned the importance of utilizing large scale research data such as PatientsMap data as basic information to better assess the validity of the client’s assumptions and/or their prior knowledge, better design ad-hoc market research, to determine the efficiency of budget management (e.g. R&D and sales rep allocation), and to better understand the outcomes of ad-hoc market research.

The transcript to her presentation can be found in the CMRA website (Chinese only);

http://www.cmra.org.cn/newsshow.php?id=531