BBC PROGRAM NAME: “OUTLOOK”

PRODUCER: Jasper Bouverie (011-44-171-557-3697)

MODERATOR
If I asked you to name a few pharmaceutical brand name drugs, how many would you be able to list? [Radio listeners listing drug names on the air]

MODERATOR
Perhaps your answer would differ from those we received here in London. There is no denying that many pharmaceutical brand names are well known around the world. Yet how much of this is because a drug is effective and how much is due to its branding strategy. Pharmaceutical companies invest huge amounts of money and time in giving new drugs a proprietary name. It needs to indicate to doctors and pharmacists what the drug contains, but in many cases companies also prefer a pharmaceutical brand name that members of the public will find easy to remember. James Dettore is founder and Chief Executive of Brand Institute, Inc., a brand consultancy company based in the United States in the state of Florida. James Dettore has been telling me that the Institute helps drug companies find name branding strategies for their new products.

JIM DETTORE
We branded over 300 new products last year with eight offices. But one of the block busters would be Lipitor, a huge lipid regulating agent, that would help treat cholesterol. Pharmaceutical drug brands, such as Lipitor and Zyban (for smoking cessation) as well as other prominent biotech brand name products like Neupogen and Epogen were developed purposely from both marketing and regulatory perspectives. They draw on the creative and strategic platforms to evoke a sense of professional and ethical tone, personality, and word make-up in order to effectively communicate to their respective audiences.

MODERATOR
Let’s take one of these as an example, Zyban. What is the connotation, that you want the potential customer to go away with, with a pharmaceutical brand name like that, if it’s stressed around the word “ban.”

JIM DETTORE
Yes, most definitely, the smoking cessation, banning and curbing a person’s appetite for smoking. This analogy is synonymous with another new product, Relenza. This brand name clearly expresses relief or reliability from the prefix root rel, while grounding the brand with the tonality of the influenza category.
Branding

MODERATOR
Once you have pinned down a possible biotech brand name or healthcare brand name for a product, then you still have to find out whether anywhere in the world it is already being used, etc., etc.?

JIM DETTORE
Precisely. Not only is the trademark registries an obstacle, however, the regulatory hurdles can overshadow them.

MODERATOR
It’s a very complex procedure. Has this changed significantly over the last few years? For example, would pharmaceutical companies, a few years ago, have found it much easier to find a branding strategy for their products?

JIM DETTORE

Most definitely. Being in the industry for fifteen years, going way back to the Prozac’s of the world and the Claritin's – at that time, back in the mid-eighty’s, there were many, many less pharmaceutical brand names being trademarked throughout the world (and likewise with regulatory registrations). More importantly, what has happened and evolved over that time period is that with the E.U. and with the EMEA coming to grips, you now have manufacturers in the U.S. and global markets starting to understand and appreciate these issues more carefully upfront prior to brand name development. Now with fifteen, potentially to increase to nineteen countries, comprised of eleven different languages; brand name submissions now find themselves under extreme scrutiny when faced with overcoming the stand point of filing or getting approval commercially, regulatory and trademark wise.

MODERATOR

James Dettore, let me ask you to stay there in Miami. Let me introduce now from Panang in Malaysia, Dr. Bala, a clinical pharmacologist, who is also an advisor to an organization called Consumer’s International. Dr. Bala, I understand that you don’t really like this idea of drugs having brand names.

DR. BALA
Yes, for one thing it is confusion. Number two is cost. For example, the brand name Valium which is a tranquilizer, cost four ___________ in Sri Lanka,

[comments on tape]

WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION (W.H.O.)

DR. HANS HOGERZEIL

[comments on tape]

DR. BALA [represents the consumer group from Malaysia]
[comments on tape]

W.H.O. –

[comments on tape]

BRANDING

MODERATOR
James Dettore in Miami, let me come back to you for a final thought. It sounds like the process of globalization is making your job as someone who tries to identify good brand names, it is making it more difficult and easier in some ways as well.

JIM DETTORE
Yes it is, I am so happy to hear a colleague state that now there is going to be consistency in strategy. The ability to create these unique identities (brand names) is becoming more and more difficult because there are only so many letters in the alphabet to use, and so many roots you can use in order for a pharmaceutical brand name to express itself from a marketing viewpoint. That means very short healthcare names, usually two or three syllables, indicative of being less descriptive and more as we call “personality driven,” or unique biotech names will evolve. These healthcare names shall incorporate the need to address medication nomenclature error potential. These criteria, shall make is even more and more difficult.

MODERATOR
James Dettore in Miami. We also heard from Dr. Bala in Penang, and Dr. Hans Hogerzeil of the W.H.O. in Geneva. If you have any comments on the subject, we would love to hear them.
Branding