Promotional support: a formative scale development

Purpose In pharmaceutical marketing, salespeople require promotional instruments to satisfy and retain their customers (physicians), but companies ignore the need because of the costs involved. It appears that the importance of promotional support is understood differently by managers and sales representatives. This study aims at developing a new construct called “promotional support”, as a resource support provided to salespeople to help them satisfy customer needs and achieve sales goals. Design/methodology/approach A detailed review of literature is followed by in-depth interviews to create items for the construct “promotional support”. Substantive validity is performed for identification of items measuring the construct. To initially validate the measures, a vignette study is performed. Formative index development procedure is followed. Data from a sample of 124 pharmaceutical sales representatives are collected and analyzed. Findings A formative construct is developed which possesses convergent (redundancy analysis) and nomological validity. The results of post hoc validation tests like confirmatory tetrad analysis and inter-item correlation are satisfactory and confirm the authors’ conceptualization. Research limitations/implications The scale requires external validation by testing it with different samples such as managers of pharmaceutical firms. Practical implications This study will help managers of pharmaceutical firms gain insights into the role and importance of promotional inputs given to their sales representatives. Originality/value This study uses the formative scale development procedure to develop promotional support. This construct can be used to understand the effect of promotional support given to pharmaceutical sales representatives on other constructs, which in turn helps in theory-building.