Pfizer Throws In the Lipitor Marketing Towel. Meanwhile AstraZeneca Promotes Crestor on Its Corporate...
Despite Pfizer's heroic and unprecedented effort to maintain Lipitor's market share after expiry last November and after spending more than $87 million promoting the medicine, the world's biggest drug company is quietly giving up on its once-great cash cow for good because more generic versions will soon be going on sale. Meanwhile, AstraZeneca promoted Crestor on its corporate blog. It's unusual for a pharmaceutical company to mention a product by brand name on its corporate blog. It's even more unusual to mention BOTH the product AND its indication -- because that would be promotion regulated by the FDA. But AstraZeneca has done just that on its 'AZ Health Connections' corporate blog. Why now? Can it be a purely opportunistic cheap shot?
Pharma Paid Celebrity Best Practices
Pharma marketers in the U.S. sometimes use celebrities as spokespeople for their branded drugs or for non-branded campaigns. Such celebrities include TV personalities, athletes, movie stars and others who have thousands or millions of fans, Twitter followers, etc. Should Pharma Disclose Payments to Celebrity Spokespeople? This is just one of the issues explored in a recent survey of Pharma Marketing News readers.
Are Some DTC Print Ads Too Educational and/or Persuasive?
FDA Plans to Do Two Studies to Find Out
Gamification: Now and Then
There's a lot of brouhaha these days in pharma circles about 'gamification' as if it were the newest thing since sliced bread. These days, however, it may be easier for a pharma company to create a real-life museum educational gaming experience than a virtual world game on Facebook. Way back in 1984, gamification was much simpler.
Supporting Patients via Twitter and Beyond
Although nearly two-thirds of respondents to a 2009/2010 Pharma Marketing News survey thought that using Twitter for patient support activities would be somewhat or very effective, relatively few pharmaceutical companies are doing this on a regular basis. From time to time, however, it does happen. Boehringer Ingelheim Shows How It's Done
Pfizer’s Short-lived LIPITOR Branded Mobile App
On May 22, 2012, Pfizer and Eating Well Media Group, publisher of Eating Well magazine, announced the launch of Pfizer's Lipitor For You "Recipes 2 Go" mobile application, marking the first time Pfizer has released a consumer mobile app for a prescription product in the U.S. Was It a 'Bad Ad' or Just a Bad Idea?
FDA Guidance on Responding to Unsolicited Requests for Off-Label Information
Two days after Christmas, on December 27, 2011, while most of us were still on vacation, the FDA quietly issued
How is the iPad an Effective Delivery Platform for Medical Sales Professionals?
How is the iPad a proven effective sales message delivery platform? What impact does it have on a doctor's clinical and prescribing decision-making process? These are questions that MD Mindset's proprietary iSFE Tracker(tm) methodology is designed to answer.
Here Come the Pharma Wikipedians
The Pros and Cons of Pharma Employees Editing Wikipedia Articles. Should pharmaceutical companies appoint employees as Wikipedia 'spokespeople' to perform all edits to Wikipedia articles on behalf of the company?
Multichannel Marketing: Easy to Brag About, but Difficult to Do
Multichannel pharma marketing is conceptually relatively simple to understand, but incredibly difficult in practice, says Len Starnes, former Head of Digital Marketing & Sales, General Medicine at Bayer Schering Pharma. That said, multichannel is not a transient phenomenon, it's here to stay. Starnes hosted a survey on LinkedIn to answer the question: When will pharma marketing become de facto multichannel marketing in future?
