Background
This is a long-running tracker that monitors buying preferences, and how they shift, among customers of both a major life sciences company's products and those of its competitors. It runs wave on wave across three markets — the USA, Germany and China — with tight brand quotas and detailed targeting requirements so that each wave stays comparable with the last. It is now in its ninth wave.
Our team has worked on every one of those waves. The earlier ones came before Ayesda Bio existed, when the team was based at Kudos Health.
That continuity is what protects the study. Tracker studies carry a unique pressure: any drift in sample quality, respondent profile or method can compromise the longitudinal value of the entire dataset, including the waves that came before. Reproducing an established methodology exactly is a great deal more achievable when the people doing it are the ones who established it in the first place.
Who We Reach
A tracker is only as good as its ability to find the same kinds of people, wave after wave, in every market. That is the hardest part of this study and the part most of the work goes into. The sample spans nine laboratory and manufacturing environments:
- Academic laboratories
- Hospital and clinical laboratories
- Pharmaceutical
- Biopharmaceutical
- Food and beverage manufacturing and testing
- Environmental testing and monitoring
- Government health laboratories
- Industrial users of chemicals and reagents
- In vitro diagnostics (IVD) manufacturing
Within those settings, respondents fall into two distinct professional populations, each with its own quota.
Research. Academic, hospital, biopharmaceutical, pharmaceutical and government research. Roles here run from researchers and research scientists to research laboratory technicians and laboratory managers, method development and method validation scientists, quality control and quality assurance specialists, and the procurement managers who convert a preference into a purchase order.
Process. Pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical manufacturing and process development, including contract development and manufacturing organisations (CDMOs and CMOs). Roles span manufacturing technicians and engineers, formulation developers and directors of formulation, process development scientists and directors, directors of drug development, process engineers, plant managers, QA/QC managers, directors and scientists, heads of manufacturing, CMC managers and directors, laboratory managers and directors, procurement and supply-chain professionals, and C-suite decision-makers including CEOs, CSOs and COOs.
That spread is deliberate. A bench scientist and a plant manager evaluate the same supplier on entirely different grounds, and a tracker that quietly drifts towards whichever of them is easier to recruit will show a shift in preference that never actually happened.
Our Approach
We recruit across all three markets against precise quota criteria for setting, role, seniority and purchasing responsibility. Recruitment runs by phone and Teams; the survey itself is hosted by the client, and we receive the links and pass each screened, qualified respondent through to the 35-minute online questionnaire. Our network provides direct access to verified respondents, rather than relying on third-party sample or aggregated panels.
Quality controls apply throughout: screening validation, response-time monitoring, and consistency checks against prior-wave benchmarks. Every screener is recorded and archived, with each interview individually traceable. The study runs double-blind, and our multilingual team coordinates across time zones to keep fieldwork to schedule.
Outcome
In total we have conducted 546 interviews across the three markets, delivered on schedule and to specification, and maintaining full continuity with every previous wave. The client receives clean, validated data that integrates seamlessly with their existing longitudinal dataset, enabling robust trend analysis across markets.
Key takeaway: Tracker studies live or die on consistency, and consistency ultimately lives in people rather than documents. A methodology can be written down and handed over; the judgement about whether a borderline respondent really belongs in the sample is what keeps nine waves comparable.