Abstract:
The population growth and economic development of Ethiopia
contribute for huge demand to health care services in general and
pharmaceutical products in particular. There are various local and
global players in Ethiopian pharmaceutical industry where the
competition is becoming stiff in the country. The major factors
affecting selection of a specific brand of pharmaceutical product is
affected by physicians’ prescription behavior. Numbers of firms have
yet to understand and revise the impact of this in their firms. This study
was conducted to explore the impact of pharmaceutical promotion
strategies on prescribing behavior of physicians and determine the
convinced promotional tools that are most effective in influencing the
prescribing behavior. A Cross-sectional survey strategy was used to
collect data through self-administered questionnaire from physicians
in Addis Ababa. Simple random sampling method was applied to select
respondents and a complete 270 questionnaire was found from
population of 934 physicians. The data quality was assured before data
collection through pilot testing and expert evaluation; data
representativeness through KMO, and reliability of the constructs
through sample Cronbach alpha tests were measured. Factor analysis
was used for data reduction, ANOVA, F-test, and Independent-Sample
t-test has been applied to test the hypothesis of the research. The
finding shows that sales promotion has been perceived to be the most
influencing factor and personal selling has been revealed to be the
second most important factor. The advertizing, sales promotion and
promotional strategies have also been perceived as the third, fourth and
fifth important influencing factors respectively. Public relation is
perceived as the least important factor. The pharmaceutical companies
in Ethiopia need to apply aggressively Sales Promotion as their
marketing communication strategy and invest less on public relation.
