Healthy Skepticism Library item: 11833

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Publication type: news

Whalen J.
Glaxo to Weigh Results Of New Diet Pill
The Wall Street Journal 2007 Oct 24B3
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119318525782469204.html

Full text:

Drug Company Hopes Alli Delivers for Quarter; Web-Driven Sales Plan

When Gayle Jordan, a 25-year-old in Chesapeake, Va., began taking the diet pill Alli this summer, she started Alli-user support groups on MySpace.com and YouTube. Her MySpace page now boasts 166 members, who can log on to see videos Ms. Jordan posts every few weeks describing her progress, and post their own diet stories and messages of support.

GlaxoSmithKline PLC, which makes Alli, has begun an ambitious online, television and print campaign to increase sales of the drug, the only diet pill approved by the Food and Drug Administration for sale without a doctor’s prescription. In its market research, the company found that dieters like to get advice and support from other dieters, and that the Web helps them interact. So Glaxo is putting particular emphasis on the Internet. It has set up several Alli-themed sites and is also trying to tap into independent groups like Ms. Jordan’s.

Whether Glaxo’s Alli marketing strategy is working will become clearer today, when the company reports third-quarter results. Yesterday, Glaxo said it has sold more than two million packages of Alli since the drug went on sale June 15 in the U.S. Mike Ward, a pharmaceutical analyst with Nomura Code Securities in London, called the figure “encouraging.”

Glaxo, based in Brentford, England, is the world’s second-largest drug company by revenue after Pfizer Inc., and it needs some good news. Its earnings are expected to be hit by a fall-off in sales of its diabetes drug Avandia, which is facing safety concerns.

The market for weight-loss pills is huge — in the U.S. alone, about half of the women and a quarter of the men try to diet each year, according to Jean Harvey-Berino, a weight-loss expert at the University of Vermont, and 130 million Americans are overweight or obese. But diet-pill sales usually soar at first, and then plummet, because most people give up on their diets.

The Internet is changing weight loss — and in some cases, increasing the odds of a dieter’s success. Studies show online programs that advise people on eating and exercise habits can help them lose weight. Dieters also say they use the Web to find support groups to help keep them on their diets.

Alli, known by the generic name orlistat, works by blocking the gut from absorbing some fat from food. An Alli starter kit with a bottle of 90 pills sells for about $50 at Wal-Mart.

To try to keep people on Alli, Glaxo designed a marketing strategy that relies heavily on its own Internet sites and tapping into the more casual blogosphere.

In April 2006, to seed the market, Glaxo started a Web site that offered dieting tips and collected email addresses, among other details, from visitors. Glaxo used the site to recruit 400 people to what it called the Alli First Team, a group that got the drug first once the FDA approved it in February.

Glaxo encouraged team members to talk about their experience with others, in person and online. When Glaxo set up a blog in June, many members posted glowing comments about the drug. Some also created an Alli support group on SparkPeople.com, a health-and-fitness Web site.

When it began selling the drug in June, Glaxo set up an online counseling program called My Alli Plan. Dieters who register agree to report their weight, calorie and fat intake and exercise levels each week. The site sends them customized feedback, such as advice on how to control eating urges or avoid negative thinking.

If people don’t check in, they receive an email reminding them to log on, says Gary Foster, an obesity researcher from Temple University in Philadelphia who helped Glaxo and its ad agency, imc2, develop the site. “People do better with structure than without,” Mr. Foster says.

So far, more than 200,000 people have enrolled in My Alli Plan, says Steve Burton, vice president for weight control and head of Alli marketing at Glaxo.

Some research suggests that online counseling can help people lose weight and maintain weight loss. A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2001 divided 91 overweight adults into two groups. One got access to an Internet site offering information on weight loss. The other group got access to the same site, plus weekly online counseling sessions with a weight-loss expert. Twice as many people in the latter group lost 5% of their body weight after six months.

Glaxo is also trying to get Alli users to support each other with a message board on its site. That approach carries some risks for Glaxo if dieters give bad advice such as too-quick weight-loss tips. Mr. Burton says Glaxo has hired a group of dietitians to monitor postings and correct misinformation.

Ms. Jordan started posting online because “the support you get from everybody else is what everybody needs,” she said in a telephone interview. Ms. Jordan, who is five feet tall, says she has dropped to 207 pounds from 233 pounds while taking Alli. She aims to get down to 128 pounds.

Glaxo has also set up a blog called alliconnect.com. On it, Mr. Burton and his marketing team post weekly on such topics as unrealistic weight-loss goals, blood pressure or herbal supplements that promise to melt away pounds. They use the blog to defend Alli from criticism and to gather comments from readers. And they link to other blogs being written by dieters taking Alli.

In doing that, Glaxo connects potential customers to information it can’t control. In one blog, “Anna Lightens Up,” the author, Annaliese Lee, told readers this summer that she would stop taking Alli because she couldn’t “justify the added expense of another bottle of Alli right now.” A few weeks later she started taking the pills again, but since then she has often acknowledged that she isn’t eating well or exercising — which Glaxo’s marketing emphasizes are important parts of the Alli plan.

Write to Jeanne Whalen at jeanne.whalen@wsj.com