Abstract:

The pharmaceutical industry follows a model where product brands stand alone and the company is not strongly linked to any specific prescription brand. This allows potential corporate protection should a leading brand have PR issues around a drug. This presentation describes research assessing the future relationship between pharmaceutical companies and brands in terms of the corporate equity that manufacturers bring to the drug. Our hypothesis considers if this might change because of the increased exposure of marketing and medical education directly to patients, resulting in increased marketing spend at brand level. However, increased cost control and the need to minimise budgets may cause change. We explore whether pharmaceutical companies have corporate equity today, using technology combined with creative research to aid insight, and we test how fast one could understand corporate equity in a crisis.