Healthy Skepticism Library item: 3089

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: Journal Article

Pharmaceutical prices in Canada: guiding principles for government policy
Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association of Canada 1981 Feb;

Abstract:

It is pointless to carp about promotion expenditures as “socially wasteful.” All competition involves a dregree of waste, but competition is desirable because the long-run social benefits outweigh the immediate social costs. Promotion of one’s products is a form of rivalry for business. It would be foolish to expect companies both to invest large sums for discovering and developing new products and to be reticient about calling attention to the pharmaceutical, chemical and therapeutic properties that determine their sales. It is not the discovery of new drugs, but their sale, that pays for R&D and other investment. The same vigorous competition that is looked to as a generator of pressure to innovate must also serve to generate the funds to finance innovation, and that leads naturally to product promotion. It is difficult to determine with any exactness what part of pharmaceutical promotion expenditures may properly be thought of as relating to information and education functions and what part as relating to selling functions. Both are clearly involved. To say that promotion expenditures are a natural, desirable and economic form of competitive activity is not to say that every form which promotion may take under the stresses of market competition is acceptable. An industry markting products closely affecting the public’s health and doing so through an intermediary agent, the physicians, can properly be held to extremely high standards of truthfulness, accuracy and ethical conduct. While regulation of promotion claims is sound, however, regulation of promotion expenditures is not. Competition in the search for new medicines and competition in product sales are as inseparable as the head and tail of the same coin, and product promotion is an integral part of pharmaceutical competition. There is no practical way of limiting promotion without simultaneously limiting the vigor of the competition from which it springs and from which the public benefits.

Keywords:
*analysis/industry perspective/value of promotion/ competitive consequences of promotion/ATTITUDES REGARDING PROMOTION: INDUSTRY