To Brand or Not to Brand? The Question of Current and Future Pharmaceutical Marketing Campaigns

A recent trend in prescription direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising has been the increasing presence of non-branded, help-seeking or unbranded ads. These ads make no mention of a branded prescription medication, using only the pharmaceutical manufacturer as an identifier. Though these ads have been around since the inception of DTC, no direct comparison to its branded counterpart in the area of consumer response has been conducted in the literature. An online survey panel was used to examine the effects of these two DTC ad types, branded and non-branded, on consumer attitudes and behavioral intentions. Whether the self-reported measures of intent correlated to a pre-defined information seeking behavior was also analyzed. Each study group (allergy or oral contraceptives/family planning) consisted of two subgroups. The first subgroup was shown a nonbranded (help-seeking) ad and the second subgroup was exposed to the corresponding branded ad. The drug and pharmaceutical company names were fictitious and created to reduce bias. The branded ad stimuli modeled the form of current print DTC ads, with drug information contained in each ad taken from print ads for Yaz®, a prescription OC, and Allegra-D®, a prescription antihistamine/decongestant. From these branded ads, non-branded ads were created to follow recent FDA guidelines (Food and Drug Administration (2004), “Guidance for Industry – Help-Seeking and Other Disease Awareness Communications by or in Behalf of Drug and Device Forms” January.)