Pharmaceutical marketing strategies’ influence on physicians' prescribing pattern in Lebanon: ethics, gifts, and samples

BACKGROUND: Drug companies rely on their marketing activities to influence physicians. Previous studies showed that pharmaceutical companies succeeded to manage physicians prescribing behavior in developed countries. However, very little studies investigated the impact of pharmaceutical marketing strategies on prescribing pattern in developing countries, middle-eastern countries. The objective of this research was to examine the influence of drug companies’ strategies on physicians’ prescription behavior in the Lebanese market concerning physicians’ demographic variables quantitatively. Moreover, this study tested whether Lebanese physicians considered gifts and samples acceptance as an ethical practice. METHODS: Sampling was done by using a non-probability method. An online cross-sectional study was conducted through WhatsApp. A self-administered questionnaire survey was conducted during the months of February and March 2018. Cronbach’s Alpha reliability coefficient was calculated. Data were statistically analyzed by using IBM SPSS statistics version 24 software. Chi-square and Cramer’s v tests were used to finding sign correlation, and Spearman test was used to measure the strength and direction of a relationship between variables. RESULTS: Results found that pharmaceutical marketing strategies are correlated to physicians’ prescribing behavior. We demonstrated that the majority of the promotional tools tested were mostly or sometimes motivating physicians to prescribe promoted drugs. The major tools that physicians agreed to be mostly motivated by are visits of medical representatives and drug samples while sales calls made by pharmaceutical companies are the less influential tool. Regarding gift acceptance, this study demonstrated that physicians consider gifts’ acceptance as a non-ethical practice. Results showed that most physicians use free samples to treat their patients. We demonstrated that there is a relationship between physicians’ prescribing pattern and their age, gender and the location of practice. CONCLUSIONS: Findings of this study provided an insightful work, serving as one of the first humble steps in the imminent direction of merging this paper with the previous literature. From a managerial perspective, pharmaceutical marketing managers of drug companies can use the research findings to design better their strategies directed to the Lebanese physicians who can also benefit from the results obtained. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12913-019-3887-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.