This is lesson 2.1.3 for the Pharmaceutical Industry. Who or what influences your customer? I am Steve Parente, Professor of Finance, Carlson School of Management. So here's an ad that came out recently with the closing of the Downton Abbey series. Just kidding of course. But it's an interesting ad for those who've never seen this before. It is an ad for Cialis. Cialis is a pill for male erectile dysfunction. For some reason, this ad is suggesting that with cialis, you can cruise through China, even though it doesn't look like either of these folks are Asian, and go through the Yangtze Valley. And somehow, that will bring happiness. This is all a very elaborate and sort of interesting way to say that approaching the customer for pharmaceutical products can take all different ways, and procedures, and ideas. So if we take a big step back and say, if you're trying to influence the customer, the person who's really using this product, and actually the physician will be prescribing it. What are your key things that you're trying to achieve? One is that we're definitely talking about hope, hope to basically get a cure. If you really think about what pharmaceuticals are there to do, cure is the most exciting and wonderful thing that they could possibly do. And there's been many success stories. I mean polio vaccines, in terms of what can be prepared there. All the antibiotics that came on the line. Penicillin, just tremendous products. And then if you just think about the influence of some mental health products to bring folks, really to have functioning lives. It may not be completely cured, but it certainly has helped. Another thing is to enhance someone's state. They may be at a functional status and not really where they would like to be. Some of that could be just to have them be functional to just be able to live their life better and out of pain. Some of it can lead to, back to our prior side, sort of enjoyment, personal fulfillment, and not get too weird about it. But enhancement is part of that as well. And then relief for folks that are in pain, particularly folks who have cancer. They're are many diseases actually that are quite painful as you go through them, particularly brand of life care. Relief is just a really major piece of it. And any sort of palliative care to really take that pain away is quite helpful. And then another idea is, is what can you afford? Is something too expensive? Is it priced sometimes too cheaply, actually, and you are overusing a particular product. So those are some of the ideas about what you're trying to convey and what's the value of those products. But how do we actually then achieve influence through marketing? And advertising is probably one of the key areas in terms of what happens here. We have TV since 1997, The Balanced Budget Act actually put that into play. And then magazines as well, whether or not it's just straight to consumer or the things that go into different drug ads. The Internet has become really a potent way of advertizing. At first people didn't really conceive how the Internet would work this way. The Dotcom era in the 1990s in the 2000 but with Google ads, and Facebook ads, and then also issues about things like just patients like me. There's just a lot of social media, and personal networking that can actually really raise awareness about drugs and different therapies. Clearly physicians are key, they are the gateway to basically prescribing. Alternative Providers as well, depending on the country you're in, pharmacists are going to be your gateway there, maybe not so much the physicians. Nurses can prescribe as well. So those are all vital folks in terms of who's in play. And then science, just the notion of what is being achieved and the different opportunities. Whether they be biological drugs, whether it'd be things coming through personalized medicine and genomics, the brand I discussed in the first module that's really there. And then the last thing is that popular culture does play a major role. Both in TV and movies, there is this sense of it's easy to fix this. And a lot of it's reinforced with reality too. I mean wars are horrible, horrible, horrible things. But the mortality rate from wars are far different. If you see movies now, compare it to say a movie that focuses on World War I. Or it could even be as like All Quiet on the Western Front, or River Runs Through It, the battle scenes there, or Gallipoli with Mel Gibson. It's just horrible, horrible mutilation and then you go to the Iraq War and what you might see in the Hurt Locker and yet people are dying but they're wounded and they're, otherwise they're actually surviving things. And they're surviving things in part because of actually a combination of pain pharmaceuticals, sometimes medical devices but things that are basically allow them stabilize them. Put them into comas, transfer them. Moderate their pain so they don't are getting sudden cardiac arrest from just all of the trauma that they're feeling. A lot of that has to do with pharmaceuticals and the expectation of what we as society, through popular culture, expect of these products. Affordability is a major issue. We mentioned before in our first course the whole issue of public and private insurance, drugs, people will self pay. There's not much Cialis that's paid for by public or private insurance, though sometimes they do that. It depends on the state you're in actually for public insurance. Theft is also a major issue too. If people really want to get ahold of drugs, they will steal them. Particularly for ones that bring pleasure or relief. A lot of the Oxycodone abuse products that are painkillers, there's a lot of abuse that's going on like that. And in many cases the drugs are being outright stolen if they think they can get it from the clinic or actually from someone taking those drugs. Might be a senior that just doesn't know any better that someone might be taking their drugs inappropriately. Rebates is a way that drug companies and also insurance companies provide vehicles to make drugs more affordable. And then samples, obviously, that are provided from pharmaceutical companies to the physicians to give to patients just to try things out. And sometimes those samples actually provide an extra roll for folks that are on low income as well. So to wrap this conversation about influence, we return to our friends here, that are, in this case we have a different branding of cialis tablets for the marketing strategies here. Like never before your night was satisfied using of cialis tablets. The two seagulls here, I just don't know. I mean, there is of course the bathtub ad where folks are there together. I've seen ones now where there's folks hunting and it's a cialis ad. The point of all this is that depending on your cultural orientation, the way cialis will be marketed and how it influences the images it tries to draw to you will be quite different. So a lot of it does depend upon, are we marketing to in North America? Are we marketing to UK markets or former commonwealth countries as they're known, of what was the British Empire? Are we marketing to Asia? It also could just be a question, are we marketing different religions? Are we marketing for Christianity, are we looking at Islam? Are we marketing the folks of the Jewish faith, folks of Hindu faith, sometimes it's tough. It could be completely offensive to them too, particularly of Islam. But it is a question of influence and how these market messages come together. Some of them are actually very direct, but keep in mind that as a product, the cialis and all of its friends, in terms of what they have for what's otherwise known as the requisuticals, are command of substantial amount of the budget of this industry. This concludes our influence lesson for the pharmaceutical industry.
