Generalizing the effectiveness of pharmaceutical promotional expenditures

We perform a meta-analysis to formulate generalizations on the effectiveness of pharmaceutical promotional instruments. A literature search on this topic yields 58 usable (published and unpublished) sources documenting 781 effects. We investigate different direct-to-physician (DTP) and direct-to-consumer (DTC) instruments and study whether and how moderator variables influence promotional effectiveness. Pharmaceutical promotional elasticities are modest in size and differ among marketing instruments. In general, DTP elasticities are higher than DTC elasticities, but the relative effectiveness of DTP instruments depends on the disease category. Higher elasticities appear in studies that include price as an independent variable in the models. Studies that account for endogeneity find lower elasticities.