Latent Class Models for Marketing: An Application to Pharmaceuticals.

In this paper some extensions of the latent class (LC) approach are applied to analyze the Italian pharmaceutical market. This sector is characterized by a high level of competitiveness, more limited economic budgets than years ago and, at the same time, expensive sales and promotion activities; in this context, it is very important to know the reference market, so to design appropriate marketing strategies. The paper has two aims: (i) identifying groups of doctors homogeneous for attitude towards pharmaceutical representatives’ activities; (ii) verify which aspects of the promotional activity may be significant in order to influence prescription quantities.