Pharma marketing researchers should provide actionable recommendations to brand managers and be more proactive in identifying opportunities to research business issues, said TGaS Advisors.

Those are two areas in which pharma brand managers, surveyed by TGaS, have given marketing researchers relatively low scores, the advisory firm said.

TGaS, a unit of KnowledgePoint360, released the tips in a brief designed to help professionals ensure relevance to their organizations.

Its brief follows the State of the Industry (SOI) survey, developed and fielded in late 2011 by TGaS and the Pharmaceutical Marketing Research Group (PMRG), that found a widening chasm in the relationships between suppliers and clients, and (partly due to lower headcount) that a declining number of market researchers expects to have a big influence on commercial decision making.