In a high-tech medical device industry, manufacturers are leaning more heavily than ever on cyberspace to boost their marketing efforts. A show of hands at last month's annual meeting of the Medical Marketing Assn. (MMA) in Keystone, Colo., showed that nearly every manufacturer represented at the two-day meeting uses the Internet on a regular basis to reach product decision-m akers and end-users alike.
However, for the time being at least, the World Wide Web is a long way from replacing medical sales reps. Instead, reps are being used more selectively and, in most cases, more intelligently and more effectively than ever before.
Sales reps are being relied upon to direct customers to home pages and to provide the essential information to maintain the major-league databases that form the backbone of most successful medical device home pages.