External Reference Pricing in Pharmaceutical Industry

Seminar paper from the year 2012 in the subject Business economics - Marketing, Corporate Communication, CRM, Market Research, Social Media, grade: B, Stanford University, language: English, abstract: In the marketing practice, marketers largely focus on four key elements that include the product itself, the price of the product, the place, or the location where the product or service is made available for the customers and the promotional activities that are geared towards creating awareness of the product and informing the target audience about its unique attributes. In all of the four marketing elements, it is only price, which is revenue generating and it plays a crucial role in ensuring that a particular product or service sales in large volumes thereby making a company more profitable.
In the determination of price, various factors come into play and they include cost of producing the product or delivering the service, the economic condition of the target market, competition level in the market, the brand name of the product/ service, and the quality of the product/ service (Baines et al. 2013).
Under competition, marketers tend to consider the price of other competing product/ service whilst setting the new price and this strategy is called external reference pricing. According to Trivedi (2002), the idea behind this pricing strategy is that the price should not be too high or low to the competing products/ services. In the pharmaceutical industry, external reference pricing, is commonly applied in order for the government to tame the prices of pharmaceutical products that are protected by intellectual property rights and even enable the pharmaceutical companies to benefit from a created monopoly arising from the patented drugs.
This present study seeks to investigate the flaws of external reference pricing strategy in the pharmaceutical industry from the point of view of PainCeptor Pharma in Canada, and it will seek to provide a recommendation to the Canadian government on whether to continue using this strategy or not in the pricing of pharmaceutical products.

The case of PainCeptor Pharma in Canada
PainCeptor Pharma is a private Canadian company that specializes in the development of drugs that focus on treating pain by acting on the outside of the central nervous system on the noiceptors. This development strategy acts as a unique and competitive advantage for the company because its drugs focus on avoiding the already known side effects of existing central acting agents. [...]