October 14th, 2023, Bhavika Bansal
In an era marked by an ever-evolving healthcare landscape, the quest for reliable medicines and healthcare products has become a complex journey. The choices consumers make in healthcare are deeply personal. Driven by a complicated interplay of factors, consumers today find themselves at the intersection of information and innovation. A new YouGov survey across 17 international markets seeks to unveil the dynamic pathways by which consumers typically discover new medicines and healthcare services.
As per the results of the survey, amongst the consumers we polled globally, word-of-mouth recommendation (19%) is the most popular means of discovery for new medicines and healthcare products, followed by in-store promotions (12%).
Less than a tenth of all the consumers we polled say they typically discover new healthcare products through social media and online ads (8% for both). Interestingly, one out of five consumers say that they do not use any of the given channels (21%), possibly, in part, due to consumers’ unwillingness to switch to new medicines and healthcare products in the first place.
A closer at the data for 5 key markets – Great Britain, Denmark, the US, the UAE, and India – further reveals some interesting nuances.
Much like in the case of the market average, word-of-mouth recommendations are the most popular channel for consumers to discover healthcare products across these markets. Interestingly, almost twice as many consumers in the UAE and India (23% for both) say so compared to their Danish counterparts (12%).
In-store promotions come in second among consumers in Great Britain (11%), Denmark (9%) and India (14%), a spot occupied by television advertisements in the US (14%) and social media in the UAE (18%).
Notably, almost two-fifths of our Danish respondents (37%) say that they not typically use any of the given channels to discover new medicines and healthcare products, as do 30% of Britons and 27% of Americans. On the other hand, this proportion falls significantly when it comes to the UAE and India (6% and 10% respectively), an indicator, perhaps, of a greater willingness to discover and switch to new or different healthcare products among consumers in these markets.
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Methodology: YouGov Surveys: Serviced provide quick survey results from nationally representative or targeted audiences in multiple markets. The data is based on surveys of adults aged 18+ years in 18 markets with sample sizes varying between 512 and 2,000 for each market. All surveys were conducted online in August 2023 Data from each market uses a nationally representative sample apart from Mexico and India, which use urban representative samples, and Indonesia and Hong Kong, which use online representative samples. Learn more about YouGov Surveys: Serviced.