Healthy Skepticism Library item: 3439

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: Journal Article

Hutcheon L, Hutcheon M.
Medical “mythologies”: a semiotic approach to pharmaceutical marketing
Queen’s Quarterly 1987; 94:(4):904-916

Abstract:

In North America today, it is estimated that well over a billion dollars a year is spent on advertising by pharmaceutical companies in an attempt to influence the prescribing practices of physicians. The weekly and monthly journals by which dcotors keep up to date are financed by these drug advertisements-which can constitute up to one quarter of the total number of pages of a given issue. Yet most physicians claim that they never really read drug ads. They do, however, seem to notice them in passing. What can a drug advertisement achieve, then, relying (as it apparently must) upon short exposure impact? And what if a doctor does read the ad? This is, after all, a complex drug and not a cigarette brand s/he is choosing. Must ads therefore appeal at more than one level? What exactly can and do they appeal to? It was questions like these, in conjunction with the ubiquity of these advertisements and their economic impact, that provoked this study. It is the authors contention here that semiotics can offer methodological tools which have the potential to uncover relationships between advertising’s ideological and economic impact and the meaning-producing activity of the viewer as decoder.

Keywords:
*content analysis/semiotics/journal advertisements/images in ads/doctors/myth/EVALUATION OF PROMOTION: JOURNAL ADVERTISEMENTS/IMAGES IN PROMOTION: MYTH