Charles Ornstein and Ryann Grochowski Jones published a story yesterday that’s gotten a lot of attention. It’s an examination of where pharmaceutical companies spend most of their marketing budgets:
The drugs most aggressively promoted to doctors typically aren’t cures or even big medical breakthroughs. Some are top sellers, but most are not. Instead, they are newer drugs that manufacturers hope will gain a foothold, sometimes after failing to meet Wall Street’s early expectations.
“They may have some unique niche in the market, but they are fairly redundant with other therapies that are already available,” said Dr. Joseph Ross, an associate professor of medicine and public health at Yale University School of Medicine. “Many of these, you could call me-too drugs.”
Maybe this is just my marketing background blinding me to an obvious outrage, but….what else would you expect? This is what every company does. If you’re in marketing, you spend a lot of money on new product launches and you spend a lot of money where you most need to differentiate yourself. This is nothing unique to pharma. It’s just the common-sense way that marketing works.
There’s a lot that’s wrong with pharmaceutical R&D priorities, and there’s also a lot that’s wrong with pharmaceutical marketing strategies. But spending a lot of money on new products that have entrenched competitors? If that’s wrong, then every consumer products company on the planet is doing something wrong. I’m a bit at a loss to figure out what the story is supposed to be here.
