Healthy Skepticism Library item: 8811
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
Petrecca L.
Ads try for smiles through sneezes
USA Today 2007 Mar 5
http://www.azcentral.com/business/consumer/articles/0305gns-colds-ads05-ON.html
Full text:
Cold and flu season is anything but fun.
Yet makers of over-the-counter remedies are putting a bit of levity into their Web sites, ads and product designs to try to stand out on the drugstore shelf.
“Most of these products are basically the same,” says Gaurav Kapoor of the New England Consulting Group, which advises pharmaceutical companies.
Most of the medications, he says, list the same active ingredients to treat the same symptoms.
Some ways that marketers are promoting their panaceas:
- Creating a funny, icky-looking icon. Adams Respiratory Therapeutics’ Mucinex ads feature Mr. Mucus, a slimy, green blob.
One commercial shows the character and his phlegmy friends dancing in a conga line inside a woman’s body. After she takes Mucinex, a phlegm-loosening expectorant, the whole crew is evicted.
In a print ad, Mr. Mucus’ T-shirt reads: “Mucus is beautiful.”
The campaign’s tag line: “Mucinex in. Mucus Out.”
- Making pediatric versions more kid-friendly. In May, McNeil Consumer Healthcare introduced Children’s Tylenol with Flavor Creator, a product that temporarily relieves kids’ aches and pains due to a cold or the flu.
The medicine comes with packets of four crystallized flavors – apple, bubblegum, chocolate or strawberry – that can be sprinkled into each liquid dose.
The Flavor Creator Web page bills the flavor choices to parents as a way to “make it easier to get your child to take medicine.”
Improvita Health Products hopes to do the same with its bear-shaped throat-soothing lollipops.
“It has pectin in it, so you salivate and create a barrier so the throat doesn’t hurt as much,” says Connie Dease, the company’s director of marketing.
- Web entertainment. Kids can play games at Novartis’ Triaminic site (www.triaminic.com). The “children’s section” is packed with activities including a game where kids can click and drag puzzle pieces into images such as a picture of swimming ducks.
The site also has an area of family-oriented recipes such as “ants on a log” (made with celery, peanut butter and raisins) and “spider sandwiches” (round crackers, peanut butter and pretzel sticks).
The website also has a recipe for that cold and flu season staple: chicken soup.
- Humorous TV ads. An ad for NyQuil, from Procter & Gamble’s Vicks unit, opens on a sick woman who can’t sleep.
After her husband offers her NyQuil, it’s revealed that he also signed them up for a reality show, and their bedroom is filled with a noisy film crew.
Humorous ads are a way “to stand out” in the crowded cold-remedy category, says Laura Ward, assistant brand manager for Vicks.
A second ad is not comic, but takes a lighthearted approach to showing how NyQuil and DayQuil keep a sick mom on her feet.
While done with a light touch, it seems to be tough to make people like an ad that makes them think about colds and flu. Just 7 percent of adults surveyed by Ad Track, USA TODAY’s weekly consumer poll, say they like the NyQuil ads “a lot,” compared with the Ad Track average for all ads of 20 percent.
About 16 percent deemed the ads “very effective,” though another 64 percent rated the NyQuil ads “somewhat effective.”
Ward says the company is pleased with the advertising.
“We deliver our message in a light-hearted, engaging manner, and we feel like that’s working for us,” she says.
“It’s helped us to make an emotional connection with our consumer.”
