Research On Marketing Ethics In Domestic Pharmaceuticals

Early in ancient Chinese history, Confucian teaching on ethics has been worldwide influential, whereas systematical research into ethics dates from western modern history. The large-scale study of marketing ethics began in the United States of 1970s, when various anti-ethics marketing campaigns emerged with American great economic prosperity and endangered the interests of the consumers, the public and the society at large, which aroused increasing concerns and studies from all circles on the subject of modern marketing ethics.Pharmaceuticals has always been viewed as a particular industry vital to the public health, and is universally recognized as a sunrise industry involving hi-tech, though at the present time, value added percentage contributed by the pharmaceutical industry is yet minor in Chinese GDP. In view of the facts, Chinese government made a great effort to crack down on commercial bribery nationwide to promote fair competition in 2006.The anti-bribery campaign focused on three major fields, one of its direct target is to attack at the unethical behavior of pharmaceutical marketing field. How to regulate pharmaceutical market ethically is now being a major hindrance to Chinese pharmaceutical industry reform, and to tackle the headache, heated discussions are arising among mass consumers, academic circles and governmental institutions.On the basis of pharmaceutical marketing ethics theory, this thesis probes the current situation of the anti-ethics marketing in Chinese domestic pharmaceutical industry and analyzes its causes, with a view of providing practical reference to the pharmaceutical industry's healthy development and a guide to governmental administration over the related business. The breakthrough this thesis makes is in that it not only analyzes the practical problem of anti-ethics marketing in the pharmaceutical industry reform from an academic angle, but also puts forward some feasible solutions.Through substantial documentary studies, Chapter Two of this thesis makes a survey of the worldwide theoretical researches in marketing ethics, especially focusing on the valuable results, current status and latest development in the fields. In this chapter, the author firstly introduces the definitions of ethics and marketing ethics, and gives a brief summary of the representative ethnics judgment standards of the western world; then brings forward the general recognition from Chinese academic circles on marketing ethics standards and points out their theoretical contributions to its modern development. The author sums up the factors that influence ethics decisions, deduces the ethics decision models and pointed out the function of standardized marketing ethics. Lastly in this part, the author surveys the current status of some representative western pharmaceutical enterprises on marketing ethics.Substantiated with statistics and documents, Chapter Three begins with the definition of pharmaceuticals, and then analyses the industry's domestic marketing environment and popular marketing strategies, thus focusing on the problems of anti-ethics marketing trend predominant in the domestic pharmaceutical enterprises, which are partly due to the pharmaceutical industry in itself, partly due to the particular features of some certain pharmaceuticals, and partly due to the immature domestic outer business environment such as the lack of governing laws and necessary supervisions. The anti-ethics marketing activities have seriously violated our national, social and individual interests and are greatly tormenting the domestic pharmaceutical enterprises as well.Chapter Four explores the possible solutions to the domestic pharmaceutical industry's ethics dilemma from the angle of effectively enhancing the management within the enterprises themselves. The author takes the case of Merck Co. for example to illustrate that how to develop and effectively execute the marketing strategies and planning in conformity to business ethics is the initial step for pharmaceutical enterprises to fulfill marketing ethics. Meanwhile, establishing the corporate culture on ethics basis is the decisive measure for pharmaceutical enterprises to ensure their execution of marketing according to ethics. For the pharmaceutical enterprises, it is significant to improve the overall R&D capability. This thesis offers Nanjing Cuccess Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd with financial support of Lenove China as a case. The company not only possesses its own R&D, production and sales force, but it also expends a huge sum of money purchasing Yantai Medgenn Co. Ltd, that owns the world-class new drugs Endostar^TM, which provides product basis for Nanjing Cuccess Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd. According to the new order promulgated by the state, it is the most suitable choice for the pharmaceutical enterprises to carry out the academic marketing.Chapter Five makes attempts to resolve the ethical issues in terms of the external security of pharmaceutical enterprises. Taking DPC (Tianjin) Co. Ltd bribery case for example, announced by the United States Department of Justice in 2005, the author illustrates that it is the urgent task of managing the commercial bribery at present to expose the existing loopholes in the legal system of China, to clarify the legal objective, and to strengthen the law enforcement. The States Food and Drug Administration are responsible for the industry supervision of pharmaceutical enterprises in our country. With the employment of the comparative method, this part states that it should learn from the advanced experience of the American FDA in some respects. Finally, the direction of the State Health and Medical System reform as well as some supporting reform measures, such as the medical insurance system, the drugs price formation mechanism and the bidding procurement, also guides the development of the pharmaceutical enterprises.