Getting ahead in a stiff market
When you think of the most successful and clever advertising campaigns in history, what products normally come to mind? Nike? Coca-Cola? Maybe Apple? If these were your thoughts, then you are probably right. However, there is one product right up there with those market giants that you may not have considered and that product is an erection. For the past few months, I have been blogging about pharmaceutical advertising and its effects on the public as well as on healthcare professionals and a response I commonly hear when I talk about these issues is, “how much of an effect can these advertisements really have on people?” And if you think about it, it seems true. You see these commercials between downs on Sunday and probably never have a second thought about them. So, I began to investigate this question and found a very interesting example on how one marketing campaign completely changed our country’s drug of choice for erectile dysfunction.
In the early 2000s, Eli Lilly came to the market with a new drug for the treatment of Erectile dysfunction called Cialis. At the time, Pfizer’s blockbuster drug, Viagra, already dominated the market. Eli Lilly’s problem to overcome was how to enter the market without just being another “me-too” drug. Cialis had one major benefit over viagra, which was that viagra’s effects only last around 5 hours, while Cialis can be effective for up to 36 hours. This makes cialis much more convenient for customers to use. That is as long as they’re not constantly pulling a Ron Burgundy in public:
Eli Lilly needed to find a way to convince the public that duration of effectiveness was enough to deem it the superior medication over viagra. At the time, Viagra was heavily marketed to men with the basic premise that it would bring your mojo back in bed. After extensive market research, Eli Lilly found that the majority of people buying Viagra were actually men whose partners had pressured them to ask their doctor. Armed with this knowledge, Eli Lilly funneled money into advertisements that appealed to women rather than men. Instead of ads focusing entirely on sex, they made ads that emphasized intimacy and stressed that you could now be ready any time the mood is right without disrupting a romantic moment to take a pill. To further stress the benefit of duration, marketers branded Cialis as “the weekend pill” and with this catchy new nickname came a surge in sales as well as in pants all across America. 9 years after the release of Cialis onto the market, it surpassed Viagra’s $1.9 billion in annual sales and is now America’s drug of choice for the treatment of erectile dysfunction.
Now you may be asking yourself, “why has he dug himself so deep into this story about the fight for boner drug supremacy?” and the reason is that you can actually learn a lot about the power of pharmaceutical marketing from this story. Eli Lilly found a way to draw our attention to one specific feature of the medication which caused us to ignore the other potentially more important features such as its safety. And while Cialis is relatively safe, these tactics are used ubiquitously across the pharmaceutical industry to market much more dangerous drugs. So never forget that just as those dissatisfied wives were persuaded when Cialis commercials were played, anyone suffering may also be persuaded when they see a chance for relief.
