Generic Pharmaceuticals and the Health Care Marketing Researcher

This is an article I thought, for certain, I would never have to write in my career! During the time I have been in the industry, the concept of pharmaceutical marketing researchers actively working toward optimizing the sale of generic products was anathema. When the word “generic” was said, respectable pharmaceutical marketers would wrinkle their brows and talk with disdain about these products that could be, “for all we knew,” manufactured in somebody’s bathtub.

Pharmaceutical marketing researchers were in the business of helping to launch and maintain the franchises of premium-priced, name brand products. To the extent that we were involved with generic products at all, it was in supporting our companies’/clients’ efforts to minimize their use after patent expiry of branded drugs. Moreover, since much of my career, gratefully, overlapped the golden age of the pharmaceutical industry, with new patent-protected products and even new classes of drugs being introduced virtually daily, generics were low on our radar screens. 

In later years, however, these drugs started to lose their patent protection. Initially, pharmaceutical companies believed that, out of a combination of brand loyalty and fear by physicians and patients of generic inferiority, they could retain the lion’s share of the sale of their molecule under their brand name and with their pricing structure or slight price reductions. At the time, those more senior in our profession will recall, prescription pads carried two lines for the doctor to sign. A signature placed on one line indicated that the prescriber felt the patient’s condition made the “brand necessary,” while a signature on the other line allowed the pharmacist to substitute an approved generic version of the drug...