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Date: Thu, 14 Dec 2006 15:42:29 +0100
From: Editors IJRM <editors-ijrm@FEW.EUR.NL>

Announcement

IJRM/MSI Special Issue on Health and Marketing

With the growing aging of the world population, health has become a pressing issue. Many developed countries spend around 15% of their GDP on health. The OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) has estimated that the annual increase in per capita spending on health across its member countries has outstripped overall economic growth by approximately 70% over the last three decades.

A new field is developing within marketing that investigates “marketing of health”.  Several factors drive the development of this field. First, it is highly relevant to society at large, given that many people deal with health issues every day, either as a professional, patient, or manager. Marketing of health influences people’s day-to-day lives. Second, government plays an important role in regulating the health and life sciences industry, thus health marketing research can have strong public policy implications. Third, given the government’s involvement in regulation, many processes at the patient-, physician-, provider-, company- or market-level are reliably and continuously documented. This provides the availability of high-quality databases. Fourth, given the size of the industry, resources for supporting research are available. The familiarity with experimentation in this industry also provides behavioral researchers with a potentially enabling research context. Fifth, initial work shows that these markets may be driven by mechanisms that do not exist in other markets, such as residual ambiguity and the unique patient-payer–provider channel, to mention two of the most prominent ones.

As these trends can only seem to strengthen in the next decade, marketing of health promises to become a very fruitful area of research. To foster its early development, the International Journal of Research in Marketing (IJRM) and the Marketing Science Institute (MSI) have decided to sponsor a special issue of IJRM on this topic. IJRM/MSI invites people with diverse backgrounds (modeling, strategy and behavior) to submit papers for this special issue. Specific topics of interest include:

1. Emotional and cognitive responses to disease and treatment;
2. Information search and learning by patients and care providers (including how this varies with health status, age, etc.);
3. Effectiveness of marketing instruments:
1. Advertising: print to physicians as well as DTC;
2. Pricing: co-payment, capping costs of life saving treatment (what is a year’s life worth? who will pay for customized treatments?)
3. Promotion: who to target, where, with what information and for what drug?
4. Mix of marketing instruments: when to use which instrument and how much of it?
4. Launch and diffusion of new treatments;
5. Patient relationship management (e.g., life time value, patient compliance to therapy);
6. Prescription behavior of physicians and dispensing behavior of pharmacists;
7. Analyses of the physician-payer-provider channel (e.g., insurance, HMO) and the shifting role of the patient;
8. Innovation generation in life sciences;
9. Inter-firm cooperation in health;
10. Branding in health markets;
11. Preventative health/wellness versus treatment/cure.

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