Conclusion
Medicinal brand and medicinal product do not compete with each other. Medicinal brand should be understood as the extension of the medicinal product, an ‘avatar’ so to speak. In fact, there is no medicinal brand without a medicinal product or a service to support it. Medicinal product advertising, or communication, highlights characteristics that are identified as useful for the patient/customer. On the other hand, medicinal brand advertising, or communication, elicits a ‘story’,a‘myth’, which nurtures a sustained relationship with its target audience. The brand concept is not limited to a name given to a product or service, it is the aesthetic – which is the ‘beauty’ experienced by the target audience in a philosophical sense – in other words, it is a construction of the mind that adds certain qualities to the product or to the service to please the target audience and position the product or service as an outstanding example of its kind. A brand appropriately designed can overcome any
market barrier and competition challenge while minimizing the financial impact. In other words, medicinal brand brings in a gap or a drift, sometimes subtle, but with major stochastic effects on communication strategy opportunities. On the other hand, medicinal brand communication strategy cannot achieve anything if its underlying product or service does not have the potential. Thus, building a medicinal brand makes sense only for products that deserve it. What happens if you confuse your medicinal brand identity with a graphic identification? Then you skip fundamental questions such as the following:
• ‘What project am I concretizing? What are the dire needs? What should I associate with my Medicinal Product to raise its interest?’ • ‘What should I emphasize in – beyond my Medicinal Product characteristics – to reinforce the uniqueness and/or universal reach of my communication plan?’ • ‘What value should I select to reinforce prescribers pride and thus strengthen their fidelity?’ • ‘What perimeter should I set up for my communication strategy to provide my Medicinal Product with a broader adaptability to its environment and to its own life cycle?
What happens if you fail to build your medicinal brand yourself? Then your target audience and your competitors will do it for you anyway, but it will be out of your reach and your control. This uncontrolled brand influences your market growth and can act as an unidentified competitor. We call it the shadow brand. Lacking strategy, it gradually shrinks the limits of your medicinal product’s life- cycle expectancy and turnover. To conclude, international marketing managers and CEOs should evaluate whether their portfolio benefits from the appropriate medicinal brand communication strategy in light of the present analysis in order to maximize their resilience in face of the current market situation and trends.