Pfizer Inc discovers, develops, manufactures, and markets leading prescription medicines for humans and animals and many of the world's best-known consumer brands.
             Success in today's marketplace entails more than a superior product. It also requires an integrated product launch and superior marketing. The product launch is the first crucial step in a new product's campaign and plays a major role in determining whether the product succeeds or fails. The process is necessary to highlight the issues and challenges of launching a new product, defining every step that needs to be considered in detail and provide simple to use tools to help analyze a product's market position and develop a winning strategy and plan.
             The $75-billion drug industry has lately been represented as one of the villains of corporate America. Overpriced pharmaceuticals, enormous profits, and bloated sales forces have been the public perception, leading to the late-twentieth-century health-care move toward a managed-care system in response to the outcry for lower-priced drugs and services.
             New York City's Pfizer, Inc., with an enormous $7 billion in sales (nearly half earned outside the United States), is a research-oriented company that's in the picture for the twenty- first century.
             "We have an aging, wealthier population with high expectations for quality of life and health care, and this is occurring during a whole new golden age of drug discovery," says Henry McKinnel, executive vice president and chief financial officer of Pfizer and president of its hospital products group. "But these will also be turbulent times, and the successful companies will be those with research capability and short-term financial capability."
             Pfizer has a portfolio of products "second to none" that can contribute to lowering the overall cost of health care, McKinnel believes. His logic is that drug costs make up only 6% to 7% of
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