Analysis of Medical Representatives' Activities Directed to Physicians in Egypt

Aim. This paper aims to investigate medical representatives' (a form of personal selling) activities directed to physicians in Egyptian pharmaceutical market. Materials and methods. Surveying through simple random probability sampling is the approach appropriate for broad and representative overview of situation in research. Therefore, a survey of 1068 physicians was conducted through interviews and establishing structured data collection questionnaire. Results and discussion. This is the first empirical paper to investigate medical representatives' activities directed to physicians in Egyptian pharmaceutical market. These activities include identifying of medical representatives' activities through analysis of their visits, type of information introduced by medical representatives to physicians, using of free samples by medical representatives and compliance to ethical criteria, the required personal qualities and educational level of medical representatives as seen by physicians. These findings are useful for managers in pharmaceutical industry. They can be also useful in other industries such as medical equipment. Conclusion. Pharmaceutical companies are widely employing medical representatives, as the most effective and widely-applied technique in Egypt, but they don't sometimes comply to pharmaceutical promotion ethical criteria. Aligning marketing management vision with market real situation will lead to synergism effect in employing medical representatives.