Syndicated Sampling Product Program

The JCM provides you with an opportunity to sample your products to general practitioners — the Syndicated Product Sampling Program.
The program is a joint partnership between the JCM and Pharmaceutical Change Management (PCM). The PCM Syndicated Sampling Programme is run by Andrew Greer and is the only cooperative sample and information marketing program for general practitioners in Australia. PCM have been successfully running these quarterly programs for the past five years for the prescription pharmaceutical industry. The results achieved have been consistently excellent.

How does it work?
With the PCM Syndicated Sampling Programme, you only pay for the GP responses — there are no upfront costs or fees — and the cost per response is $4.00 for the first 1,000, which decreases on a sliding scale for greater response numbers.

For each of the products that you book, the complete Sampling Programme includes the following, all undertaken at PCM’s cost:

1. Your product’s details in a direct-mail campaign to all GPs (20,000)
2. One full-page advertisement for your product in The Journal of     Complementary Medicine
3. A reply-paid onsert to the GP circulation in the same issue of the JCM
4. A reply-paid onsert to the GP circulation in two (2) successive issues of     the leading GP medical newspaper, Medical Observer Weekly
5. Editorial about your product in two (2) bi-monthly Trade Talk issues with     full circulation to pharmacy
6. Provision of a database of responding GPs
7. Timely distribution of products and/or information to all responding GPs     by PCM

NB: the value of the above totals more than $20,000.

You then only pay for each response received

Recent results
The responses to the 2003 Syndicated Sampling Programme, which ran in the JCM’s March/April 2003 (Vol 2.2) and September/October 2003 (Vol 2.5) issues, are excellent. The seven participating complementary healthcare product brands each received responses amounting to between 4,600 and 7,500:

A natural eczema cream 7,487
A glucosamine product 6,680
A Chinese herbal cough-and-cold medicine 6,523
A herbal extract for colds and flu 6,462
A herbal stress product 5,850
A homeopathic cold-and-flu product 5,009
A herbal weight-loss product 4,651

These results clearly indicate GPs’ growing acceptance of and interest in complementary healthcare products — and their need for detailed product information and samples.

"Thanks to the sampling program we just conducted with the JCM and the
Syndicated Sampling program, we now have a database of over 6,000 doctors who are interested in our company and its products. It would have taken us years to build up such a powerful database of GPs interested in our products. We now have all the contact details of those GPs and can have direct and relevant contact with them to enable them to educate their patients. The program is vital for our brands, not only rapidly increasing our professional market coverage, but also synergistically supporting our consumer campaign."

Tony Moore, OTC Marketing, Herron Pharmaceuticals

How to get involved
The deadline for the next JCM Syndicated Sampling Program issue is:

For further information, please contact Nicole at the JCM or Andrew at PCM.

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