55% of more than 1450 life scientists surveyed agree that print advertising helps them understand and discuss their laboratory's needs with suppliers
55% of more than 1450 life scientists surveyed agree that print advertising helps them understand and discuss their lab's needs with suppliers.
Scientists also feel that ads help drive product development and lower prices by spurring competition among biotechnology tools companies.
While there is a degree of scepticism that ads fairly describe a product's actual benefits, most of those surveyed are confident of their ability to distinguish between scientific and promotional material appearing in the scientific publications they read.
These were among the many findings in the second edition of 'Advertising to life scientists', released by market research firm BioInformatics.
The 2003 edition of the report provides unbiased readership profiles and side-by-side comparisons that examine the preferences of life scientists as they relate to fifteen widely read scientific journals, magazines and newspapers, and the advertisements that are contained within their pages.
"Life science suppliers invest enormous amounts of time and money in print advertising, but it's getting more difficult to know where an ad should be placed due to the proliferation of new publications geared to this market," says Robin Rothrock, director of market research at BioInformatics.
Indeed, when asked to name the publication they find most useful in their daily work, the respondents to the survey named hundreds of different titles.
Despite the diversity of responses, a number of publications, including BioTechniques, Nature, Science, and The Scientist, are the most widely read by the life science community.
Other publications enjoy particularly strong followings in specific market segments.
"Biotech products and instrumentation are increasingly complex, and 62% of the scientists we surveyed admit that it's difficult for them to stay abreast of all the new products available to them," observes Rothrock.
"From the scientist's perspective, ads are a convenient way of becoming an informed consumer".
Scientists are also paying particular attention to ads from certain companies: Invitrogen, Amersham Biosciences, Bio-Rad, Sigma-Aldrich, and Promega were all cited as having especially attention-grabbing advertisements.
The report helps suppliers evaluate advertising opportunities by providing an understanding of what their scientific customers consider to be most useful in both a publication and an ad.
Scientific technical and medical publishers are also using the report to learn more about their readers and support their readership statistics with the goal of attracting more subscribers and advertisers. 'Advertising to lfe sientists' contains over 100 charts and/or tables and multiple cross-tabulations for the 32 survey questions, and includes detailed readership profiles of 15 leading scientific publications.
A free executive summery can be viewed at Bioinformatics's website.
[Perhaps next year's will also consider the merits of online advertising - Ed.]
