Apart from the attitudinal differences to brand building, a major reason is that the pharmaceutical industry has missed its opportunities to move out of the product attribute trap; a problem that is common in high-tech and data-driven industry sectors. A focus on the effi cacy, safety and side effects of a product brand fails to leverage the advantages possible from the management of the brand identity and its resultant brand image with customers. This understanding is not helped by the fact that the pharmaceutical brand model does not fi t in easily with the established consumer brand theory that has developed over the last three decades.
Pharmaceuticals cannot easily be explained by consumer brand theory or business to business brand models — the multiple stakeholder complexity means it just does not fi t in.
As a result, few pharmaceutical marketers understand the basics of branding. Brand identity is a synergy of tangible product brand benefi ts (functional attributes) and intangible (emotional) benefi ts that are selected and managed by the company in question. Brand image on the other hand is the consumer (or physician) perceptions of their reality resulting from company communication and product brand usage. Brand image needs to be tracked and monitored vs the chosen identity and continually adjusted to maintain an ideal positioning within the marketplace.
Even fewer pharmaceutical marketers understand the latest thinking on brand building, which is led by neuro cultural research and which highlights the fact that brands become central to our understanding of the product. What a brand means to an individual is created from memories, emotions, rules and meanings that create a system of understanding; most mental activity is not conscious or immediately accessible, invisible stored memory plays an important role in linking emotion and reason to guide what we do. These memories then have to be put in a cultural context because to live together we need to share common ground, a common ground created by rules and experiences, which when fused together give the brand a central role in understanding the product and how it should be used. A brand function hierarchy is set up, which helps us understand how a brand may work at different levels.
Put simply, if a company can create brand equity with a pharmaceutical product brand it adds value both to the customer and the company. The customer (physician, HMO and government) benefits from a reduced risk in drug choice for the physician, the patient benefi ts from increased personal commitment to the therapy and there can even be a post-prescription satisfaction for the prescriber ( ‘ I used the best medicine ’ ).
For the company, benefi ts can include the reduced cost of retaining a customer (rather than having to fi nd a new one), improved price in many markets and potentially longer revenue streams post patent expiry due to a reluctance to change.
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