Brands create value both for the company and to those that decide to use them. This is done by a dual quest of differentiation on tangible dimensions but also on intangible dimensions.
This quest is often not simultaneous: most brands start as the mere name of a product innovation. Once they achieve success, they are copied and the intangible dimension created by the communication of brand identity creates a form of protection: products may be similar but consumers choose one brand instead of another. This is the effect of habit, of proximity, of leadership and pioneering aura, and essentially of the need for reassurance. However, protections do not last: there is a need to recreate a material differentiation by innovation that delivers tangible benefits through improved products or services.
Very few sectors demonstrate the value of branding as much as the pharmaceutical sector. This sector is dominated by the ideology of progress through science. Those prescribing drugs are rational and make what they perceive as the best choice for the patient. Normally this should imply a product-driven market, in which brands are a forbidden word.
Recent research has shown however that medicines have a personality, as do all brands.
‘Personality‘ means that both generalist physicians and specialists find it possible to attribute human personality traits to medicines.
Not only did they not refuse to answer questions about brand personality, but statistical data analysis showed that some of the personality traits they ascribed to drugs were correlated with prescription levels.
You will see that the anti-ulcer medicines that are most prescribed are described as more ‘dynamic’ and ‘close’ than other forms of medication. A product, an active ingredient cannot be dynamic or close; a brand can. Thus brands of drugs do have a mental existence and influence in the minds of the prescribers. Interestingly too, although they recognised the products themselves as being totally identical and saw two brands as fully similar in the functional benefits they delivered, respondents prescribed one three times more frequently than the other. However the chosen one was endowed with significantly more ‘status’ than the less chosen one. Status is an intangible dimension created by impressions of leadership, of presence, of proximity to the doctors, of intensity of communication. It is created by marketing once the drug has been developed. Once created, this serves as competitive edge against ‘me-too’ products, at least before a new drug replaces the existing one as market leader.
This example illustrates the fact that even in the high-tech sector, brands are a psychological reality, which operate even in the context of rational decision makers who are disposed to make optimal rational decisions.
Choice is always a risk: products increase the range of choice, and thus of perceived risk.
Brands make choice easier by reducing the likelihood of choosing alternatives to the market leader.
The choice of the English word ‘likelihood’ here is interesting because it implies both a statistical concept (probability) and the mediating process by which alternatives are being more chosen (they are more ‘likeable’).
Branding is thus a consumer-oriented response to the problem of decision making in opaque and dense choice environments.
Brand spontaneous awareness and positioning (linking to a need) are short cuts that are very helpful for decision making. Brands do create a decisional bias: as such they facilitate choice and reduce perceived risk.
These examples illustrate the relationship between the product and the brand: there is a natural interaction between them. Brand mission determines what products or services should be created. These innovative products endowed with a value-adding identity create attractiveness, and encourage trials, repeat sales and loyalty despite incoming copies and low-cost alternatives. However, new disruptive innovations may shift clients’ value curves, hence change their preferences. This means that the brand cannot be defended only through intangible values: even the much admired Jaguar brand went broke and had to be bought by Ford to enable it to regain the capacity to make high-quality and hightech cars for today’s exacting new affluent consumers.
Prescription therefore typically follows a ‘two-steps flow of influence’ model.
Communication with leaders creates status and reputation, which then makes it necessary for people to be informed about this brand that everyone is talking about: familiarity with the product follows this desire
created by its reputation. Tomorrow, for certain chronic illnesses, it will be even easier to carry out direct to consumer (DTC) information advertising, mentioning the laboratory and the active ingredients of the drug, but not the brand.
Today, the role of the internet in the dissemination of information to patients, who know more on the subject than their general practitioners do, and interrogate them about the new brands and compounds, is being measured. When updating this research, the patient’s own point of view should be included as a new lever in medical prescription. Thanks to the internet, patients arrive at their doctor’s office already well informed: they have heard about this treatment or that drug on a blog, a forum, a website, in a women’s magazine and so on.
Doctors need to generate loyalty among their clients and are reluctant to act against the patient’s wishes, even if they can. For chronic illnesses, the patient’s feelings on the unpleasantness of the treatment also play a part. Price should also be integrated as a new lever: in fact, the preoccupation with reducing health expenditure is now shared by doctors themselves.
Another studies showed how certain facets of the laboratory’s image can directly influence medical prescription. This is why, in today’s global drug marketing, it is first necessary to establish the laboratory’s credibility, one country at a time. In this way it can then enjoy the source effect.