Melody Petersen
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 In 2003 Vince Parry, a pharmaceutical branding expert, wrote in the industry magazine Medical Marketing &- Media that marketers were taking their ability to create new disorders "to new levels of sophistication." He called this process "the art of branding a condition.''
Parry knew what worked to sell prescription drugs. He was the chief branding officer at inChord Communications, Inc., a network of medical marketing companies with hundreds of employees.
"The idea behind 'condition branding' is relatively simple," he wrote. |
Shannon Brownlee
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 For all its genius, condition branding raises troubling issues surrounding the pharmaceutical industry's shifting sense of responsibility to patients and doctors. While many of the techniques drug companies use to market their wares are no different from those used to sell other consumer products, drugs are not like cars or iPods. They alter the body in profound ways, and they all have side effects, some worse than others. In redefining diseases, marketers have done more than sell product; they have blurred the definitions of wellness and health. |
John J. Ratey, MD
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 Eventually the amygdala takes control of its partnership with the hippocampus, repressing the context—and thus the connection to reality—and branding the memory with fear. The stress becomes generalized, and the feeling becomes a free-floating sense of fear that morphs into anxiety. It's as if everything is a stressor, and this colors perception and leads to even more stress. "The animal becomes more anxious even while its cognitive skills are being eroded," says McEwen. |
Mark Schapiro
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 In fact, that Tufts University study found that most of the REACH exports manufactured in developing countries in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific also come from multinational firms, of European as well as African, Asian, and North American origin.) branding (the Nike swoosh or the Hasbro decal) is what happens after a product leaves a Chinese factory and is shipped to its overseas buyer. A key question, then, over the coming decades is: According to whose product-safety standards will those factories produce? |
Mark Sircus
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 Since the early 1990's millions of children around the world have taken antidepressants that health authorities are just now branding as suicidal agents. This is the other side of the magnesium deficiency, the nightmare of these drugs which only compounds and worsens the loss of magnesium from the body.
The scene has been long in the making for the patterned onslaught of psychiatry on the young. Psychiatry has only in the last two decades unleashed its devastating attack on children using lucrative chemical weapons on ?addictive psychotropic drugs posing as medication. |
Charles Barber
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 The stakes are so high that drug companies now work with branding agencies to select just the right name ... a name like Zoloft, uplifting and scientific all at the same time. The hard, decisive sounds of the letters X, Z, C, and D are attractive to drug namers. According to James L. Detorre, the president of the Institute (which came up with the names for Lipitor, Clarinex, and Allegra), "the harder the tonality of the name the more efficacious the product in the mind of the physician and the end user."114 The cost of developing a trade name for a drug is an estimated $500,000 to $2.5 million. |
Craig Pepin-Donat
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 Understanding the sales tricks, marketing gimmicks and branding spin will enable you to avoid getting stuck with a membership you will never use.
Is Joining a Club Right for You?
My own decision to join a fitness club occurred when I was 16 years old. At the time, I was playing tournament tennis and had a strong desire to excel. A friend told me about some new, revolutionary concept to improve your strength and help with physical performance in sports. The club was one of the first Nautilus® clubs. |
Shannon Brownlee
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| Where drug manufacturing was once all about searching for cures, condition branding is all about "the creation of medical disorders and dysfunctions," as marketing executive Vince Parry puts it in a 2003 issue of Medical Marketing & Media. "There are three principal strategies for fostering a condition and aligning it with a product," Parry writes. Those strategies are "elevating the importance of an existing condition; redefining an existing condition to reduce stigma; building a new condition to build recognition for an unmet market need. |
| Hospital boards began hiring vice presidents for marketing and branding, and approving the construction of "VIP suites," where cash-carrying patients, many of them from foreign countries, can enjoy such special treatment as fluffy white bathrobes, daily newspaper delivery, and gourmet meals. One hospital arranged for a dinner of freshly slaughtered goat for a Muslim patient. These days, billboards can be seen along freeways and in airports touting hospital amenities and procedures, with headlines like "We Do Botox!" and "The More You Know About Uterine Fibroids, the Better You'll Feel. |
| From the hospital's perspective, good relationships with primary care physicians like
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Campbell were a matter of branding, well worth the recruitment costs; primary care doctors who were loyal to Redding Medical would admit patients to the hospital and refer them to the hospital's specialists, especially those in its busy cardiac program. To Campbell, Redding seemed to offer a good life. The crime rate was low, the schools were good, and the area was beautiful. |
Katharine Greider
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 And it's not just about branding the drug; it's branding the condition and, by inference, a branding of the patient... What kind of patient does a blockbuster create? We're creating patient populations just as we're creating medicines, to make sure that products become blockbusters."
In other words, erectile dysfunction is now, like Viagra, Pfizer's baby. And a curious thing is happening. |
Melody Petersen
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| The idea behind 'condition branding' is relatively simple," he wrote. "If you can define a particular condition and its associated symptoms in the minds of physicians and patients, you can also predicate the best treatment for that condition."
Parry traced marketers' use of this technique back to the early twentieth century. He pointed to how the Lambert Company, which eventually became the drug giant Warner-Lambert, had greatly expanded the market for Listerine in the 1920s by creating public anxiety about a serious-sounding condition called halitosis. |
| Of all the categories of medical disorders, none is better suited for "condition branding," Parry explained, than the field of anxiety and depression. Because mental disorders are rarely based on measurable physical symptoms, he said, they are "open to conceptual definition." Many of the growing number of psychiatric conditions listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the primary reference for psychiatrists, were brought to light through funding by the pharmaceutical companies, Parry wrote. |
Shannon Brownlee
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| Sometimes it's easier to expand the total market for a class of drugs by condition branding that persuades doctors and patients that more people suffer from the disease the drugs treat than anyone ever suspected. Companies create entirely new markets for me-too drugs by selling a new sickness, like social anxiety disorder. No matter which strategy a company chooses, one of the most effective means of marketing a drug to doctors is getting other doctors to do it for you. |
Peter J. Whitehouse and Daniel George
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 As well as being a diagnosis of exclusion, AD is a label that excludes by branding patients whose brains are aging with a stigmatizing disease, and introduces anguish, fear, and slow resignation into people's lives. Every time the diagnosis of Alzheimer's is made^ we must remember that it can be as socially destructive as it is scientifically uncertain.
CHAPTER THREE
The Troubling Legacy of Dr. Alois Alzheimer and Auguste D.
Concepts, like individuals, have their histories and are just as incapable of withstanding the ravages of time as are individuals. |
Katharine Greider
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| And it's not just about branding the drug; it's branding the condition and, by inference, a branding of the patient... What kind of patient does a blockbuster create? We're creating patient populations just as we're creating medicines, to make sure that products become blockbusters."
In other words, erectile dysfunction is now, like Viagra, Pfizer's baby. And a curious thing is happening. |
David Steinman
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 The ship, packed with 750 tons of industrial-grade ammonium nitrate-based explosives and 140,000 detonators, was flying a flag from the Comoros Islands, a small country in the Indian Ocean branding itself the "first Islamic flag of convenience" for maritime shipping.
?International terrorism analysts are also especially concerned about three mysterious hijackings of tankers in the Strait of Malacca in June 2003. In one incident, the hijackers immobilized the crew of a chemical tanker registered in Indonesia and spent about an hour piloting the ship. |
Shannon Brownlee
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| One has to wonder whether, if Gadsden were alive today, he would be gratified to see the manner in which his dream has been fulfilled, how condition branding and other drug-marketing techniques have turned healthy people into patients by transforming wide swaths of ordinary human existence—everything from baldness to wrinkles, grief, worry, sex, and even shyness—into ailments in need of medical treatment. In 1993, the average number of prescriptions filled per person per year was seven. By 2000, it was eleven, and four years later it was twelve. |
Michele Simon
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 We should start with the premise that schools should not be designed to create branding opportunities," he said.27
Exploiting schools?
Another disingenuous and self-serving argument is that schools will suffer if they don't continue to sell children soda and junk food. While it's true that schools arc in desperate need of money, we should be asking: is the solution to that problem really getting children to load up on products that make them sick? We shouldn't be trading children's health for after-school programs. |
Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels
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 Similarly, any reasonable assessment would suggest the epidemic is not due simply to faulty biochemistry, but rather to a much more complex mix of many factors—including the well-funded "condition branding" designed by Vince Parry and his colleagues in Manhattan. |
| Cohn & Wolfe is actually only a brand name anyway, since it is a subsidiary of the giant WPP Group, a global conglomerate that sells advertising, PR, branding, and other services to many of the world's biggest corporations—including tobacco company Philip Morris—generating revenues of more than $6 billion a year.6
As the public relations industry saw it, GSK specifically hired Cohn & Wolfe to position social anxiety disorder as a severe condition. |
Greg Critser
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 As Kelly saw it, there were three ways of branding products: the rational, show-and-tell model, based on science and free samples; the emotional-sit-uational method, based on humor and human experience; and the spiritual-ethical method, based on attracting people to their better selves and the institutions aligned with such. Invoking Maslow's hierarchy of needs, Kelly threw down a challenge: pharma must move toward the emotional way of marketing, because "in that way we can move toward the spiritual-ethical method." And more: "We must find a way to market beyond just product."
Beyond product? |
| It then went on:
Can healthcare communication influence healthcare outcomes? Does branding enhance the placebo effect? Our take on it? We believe image and information, imagination and belief, play a huge role in the healing process. Feeding their minds can fuel positive change in both physicians and patients. Within the healthcare marketing arena, you'll find thousands of people sincerely motivated by the desire to improve health and save lives. Communicators committed to delivering messages that are truly part of the medicine. |
| The tactic worked so well — sending Zantac sales into the heavens — that it has since become a textbook example of what the industry now routinely called "branding a condition." As Medical Marketing and Media described it in a hortatory March 2003 review,
GERD elevated the medical importance of this condition by presenting it as an acutely chronic "disorder" with the underlying physiological etiology and the potential for serious long-term consequences if left untreated — a far cry from the "plop plop fizz fizz" perception of heartburn. |
| This process, also known as "pre-prelaunch branding," involved the hiring of eminent researchers in the medical specialty into which the experimental drug fell. Those thought leaders would be consulted all along the path to an NDA, and they would be free to talk and write about what they heard to their peers and in journal articles.
It was a way of encouraging consensus by people who mattered, before approval. With the new off-label ruling, it was easy to do. |
| As one marketing executive told me, "We are in the business of branding medical conditions."
This phenomenon isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it pays to note that the industry's ability to create mass consumer audiences is a fairly new phenomenon. Consider that the amount spent to advertise prescription drugs directly to consumers (called DTC) in 1980 was $2 million. In 2004, it was $4.35 billion and soaring. |
Michele Simon
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| Kraft's Loophole of Confusion: The branding Problem
A major problem with Kraft's policy of "shifting the mix" of products over to its self-defined Sensible Solutions product line is that in every case, the product packaging for the "non-advertised" products looks virtually identical to the new Sensible Solutions products. Of course, this problem is magnified when you look at the world through the eyes of a young child: in colors and shapes.
For example, what child do you know who is going to ask for "sugar-free Kool-Aid," as opposed to just "Kool-Aid"? |
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