Healthy Skepticism Library item: 12818
Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.
Publication type: news
McCauley K.
The Rx Indutry Has Lost its Heart and its Soul
Law and More 2008 Feb 13
http://lawandmore.typepad.com/law_and_more/2008/02/the-rx-business.html?cid=101911626#comment-101911626
Full text:
I look at the pharmaceutical industry from a public-relations perspective and I see this: A business that has lost its heart and its soul.
You readers who work as vendors for BigPharma – and Jane you have been among them – know many of the reasons why better than I do.
There are the consolidations, the pressure from Wall Street for profits, a changing marketplace with more savvy consumers, numerous patents expiring around the same time, competition from generics and other nations, a turning inward rather than outward to the new global and technology realities, a loss of vision about the next pharmaceutical breakthroughs.
That downward trajectory escalated with class-action lawsuits against the industry, recalls, executive firings, employee layoffs, media pile-ons, and government investigations. Trust is gone in an industry that America once pointed to as a model of not only innovation but also of the Yankee smarts to turn that into profitability and service to mankind.
In contrast to the present, there were the good old days. Many of us remember the glory era of the 1980s. Merck and its then Chief Executive Officer Roy Vagelos were praised for the amount of funding they plowed into research each and every year. The media loved them, both the company and its leadership.
That all disappeared. And it didn’t begin with withdrawing Vioxx. Those shifts usually begin when a company probably turns away from the ethic of service. That mindset of a mission to serve has to be embedded in a company’s heart and soul. When Starbucks lost it, it lost just about everything, didn’t it.
Merck’s golden touch has been replaced with what appears to be a ham-handed approach to whatever. The litigation which followed, I contend, was ultimately botched. It started with jury trials, many of which Merck won. The facts were coming out. Then Merck abruptly agreed to settle. Some of the terms and conditions of that settlement have raised ethical eyebrows. For instance, the settlement is between the company and plaintiff lawyers, not directly between the company and the alleged victims. Legal ethics experts are posing this issue: Who is the client? The answer: It’s not the alleged injured party. So, who are the plaintiff lawyers representing?
Next, there were those creepy ads for Vytorin. Soon enough those ads were canceled as the benefits of Vytorin were called into question. Class-action lawsuits, both federal and state, are everywhere. Incidentally, as many of us know, where a good relationship exists, lawsuits usually don’t happen. We might assume good relationships didn’t exist between the company and its consumers.
One more oldie by goodie from memory lane: Johnson & Johnson when it pulled its products off the shelf in the Tylenol-contamination crisis. That wasn’t necessary or mandated. It was a voluntary safety measure. No textbook, article, case study or speech on crisis management didn’t cover J&J’s approach – at least until recently.
Now, J&J seems to be setting off its own landmines to trigger crisis. Think its lawsuit against the American Red Cross for using J&J’s red logo. Some would say, business is business. But more would say that business includes reputation management. This attack on a non-profit, which helps sell and distribute J&J’s very products, positions this once benevolent giant as a seeming bully – and a greedy one too.
Perhaps the loss of heart and soul in the drug industry, though, is best captured by the saga of Lipitor, once a $12.6 billion franchise for Pfizer. Many of us saw that negative cover story in BUSINESS WEEK on Lipitor which put in play an across-the-board questioning of BigPharma’s clinical trials, disclosure of findings, and marketing practices.
The growing number of consumers who get their health information from the Internet were not surprised to see confirmed those sometimes side effects of Lipitor such as cognitive impairment. What were the powers-that-be who oversee disclosure policies thinking when they didn’t provide the full story? More and more of us look for and get the full story by connecting the dots on the Web.
That lack of transparency, bordering perhaps on being downright misleading, bit Pfizer in the rear when it was revealed that its pitchperson Dr. Robert Javik of artificial heart fame used a body double to depict him as an avid outdoorsman. That guy is as much that as Woody Allen. Incidentally, advertising by BigPharma has surged 300 percent in the past decade – to $4.8 billion.
Meanwhile, one Chief Executive Officer at Pfizer received his walking papers because the company is sure out there on TV ads but has nothing much going in the research labs.
My take is: This industry which once personified vision and smart risk-taking now is a lumbering dinosaur, grown too big and too risk-averse.
There’s little for this besieged industry to do but circle the wagons. It can’t seem to summon the heart and soul required for the passionate push to help mankind – and itself along the way.
So, the industry has resorted to attempting to protect what it does have. It seems, for example, to be stonewalling any and all attempts to make medications available and affordable for those who need them. Of course, it is lobbying against importing medication from other nations.
Can the industry heal itself? It might be too late for that, just like it might be too late for Starbucks. Business in the 21st century is totally dynamic.
The new visionaries and risk-takers in that old business have moved on. They have embraced biotechnology. My public relations advice to them: Take this new start in biotech as a fresh opportunity to create brands that communicate integrity, service to humanity and progress in applying technology.
