5.

Strategic Customers and their evolution over time

5.1. Business to Business (B2B) strategic customer

Strategic customers (B2B):

The government agencies, hospitals, healthcare, wholesalers, and pharmacies are
the strategic customers for pharma industries. They basically user medical sales
reps by inviting doctors or health care professionals for the usages of their drugs,
pros and cons and suggestions too they also disclose the composition of the drugs,
new methods/studies, clinical data, permission from the authorities.
Promoting is subject to the industry regulation(Johnson, G.2014,P.555).
The below hierarchy chart will give you a rough idea.

The communication channel of Pharmaceutical Industry

WCHGP hu o h tsav o t pre lo m ire t a m c e u t i c

mstna a lt ea l I sbe rcn sori d e s d u i s e t s r y
s

Pharmaceutical industry communications strategy or pricing strategy differs

from country to country. For instance in the country like USA, US government
has no control on prices, obviously people must pay more for few drugs when
compared to other countries (RxChnge Co.,2015) and the developing countries
like India, the main strategic customer for pharmaceutical industry is
government, Indian government controls the prices of drug (RxChnge Co.,2015).

5.2. Business to Consumer (B2C) strategic customer

Pharmaceutical companies are now directly selling their products to the

consumers which are known as Business to customer (B2C). The USA is large
market for prescriptions pharma sales (Mackey T, Liang B., 2015). The online
sales for pharmaceuticals companies is forecasted to grow up 20% of their total
sales by 2020, which is the highest penetration when compared to all industries
(Kaplan, 2015)

5.3. Strategic Customer Evolvement

Evolvement of strategic customer:
PAST
The pharmaceutical industry decisions in past were controlled by Health care
professionals because of government or insurance companies role was limited at
the same time medical practitioners were not sensitive to the pricing part but
subject to the efforts of medical representatives.
CURRENT
Now, the total scenario has changed to a larger extent because the globalization
and technology have deep effect and the government is taking the key role in
maintaining the standards and control over the pharmaceuticals industry. The
current growth of Healthcare across the world is attributed to the current trend in
which wholesalers are playing the major control and key role of strategic customer.

FUTURE
The government and wholesalers would continue to key role as the strategic leaders
in the pharmaceutical industry but consumers will also bring their gradual control in
B2C market which can be still seen limited markets only.