Book excerpt: Elements of Pharmaceutical Pricing shows account managers, product managers, marketing researchers, and other practitioners in the pharmaceutical industry how to improve your marketing and pricing skills. By describing the process for reaching pricing decisions and clarifying the environment of pharmaceutical marketing, this book demystifies the area of pharmaceutical pricing and shows how to use prices to capture the value of products instead of lowering their value. Recent pharmaceutical pricing decisions have reflected uninformed, emotional, and short-term thinking. Elements of Pharmaceutical Pricing shows you how to avoid these kinds of decisions, helping you refine your pricing skills and increase your firm's profitability by: showing you how to determine the value of a pharmaceutical product outlining a pricing philosophy that addresses the politics and problems you'll encounter tracing the pricing research process examining the role of price in the decision to purchase, prescribe, or use pharmaceuticals addressing the challenges facing the industry in the future As Dr. Kolassa explains in the Foreword, Elements of Pharmaceutical Pricing aims to “help create within [pharmaceutical] firms, and the industry, something that has been long overdue--the ability to 'price on purpose,’to make pricing decisions that are less emotional and more informed. This volume does not contain all the answers, but I believe it does pose many of the right questions, to help those charged with pricing to make informed decisions, to understand the likely implications of their pricing actions before taking them. This information should lead to better, more profitable pricing in the industry.”