In his book Bad Science, Ben Goldacre, science writer and champion of evidence-based medicine, discusses branded pain killers:
“If you went and found someone with toothache in 6000bc, or up the Amazon in 1880, or dropped in on Soviet Russia in the 1970s, where nobody had seen the TV advert with the attractive woman wincing from a pulsing red orb of pain in her forehead, who swallows the painkiller, and then the smooth reassuring blue suffuses her body … In a world without those cultural preconditions to set up the dominoes, you would expect asprin to do the same job no matter what box it came out of.”
Every drug goes through a rigorous, lengthy (and very expensive) phase of clinical trials and is ultimately approved for use for a specific condition. When the patent expires and a generic drug company comes along, they need to demonstrate that their version of the drug has exactly the same active ingredient and that it acts in the same way as the original product. This is evaluated by regulatory bodies and is approved based on it meeting these, and other, criteria. In short, the generic drug is compared to the branded drug and needs to behave in exactly the same way to be approved. There may be differences in the colour, shape, size or coating of the capsule or tablet, but when absorbed it should be indistinguishable.
However there is evidence to show that a branded product is better! Research undertaken in 1981 by Alan Branthwaite and Peter Cooper showed that branded tablets were overall significantly more effective than unbranded tablets in relieving headaches. They hypothesised that these effects are due to increased confidence in obtaining relief from a well-known pain killer brand, and that branding has an analgesic effect that interacts with the analgesic effects of the active ingredients.
Goldacre continues: “People I know still insist on buying brand-name painkillers. As you can imagine, I’ve spent half my life trying to explain to them why this is a waste of money: but in fact the paradox of Branthwaite and Cooper’s experimental data is that they were right all along. Whatever pharmacology theory tells you, that brand-name version is better, and there’s just no way of getting away from it…”
Successful brands cannot rely on the efficacy or taste of their product alone to secure the loyalty of their customers. We are seldom trying or sampling any product ‘blind’. Our perceptions have already been influenced by all of the brand communications that have brought us to that point. Often decisions about preference have already been subconsciously made.
This encapsulates how powerful branding can be. By finding a more engaging and arresting way to communicate the benefits of a product you can convince people that it is superior to something that is essentially the same, or in many cases better, before they have even tried it!
To find out about the seven essential ingredients for a successful brand click here.