Big Pharma Marketing
In the present era of health care when the solution to almost everything that ails us is a new and better drug, one would assume that drug makers place their highest priority on research for new and better drugs. Actually, the highest priority of most drug corporations, according to their budgets, is marketing what they already have. More than a third of the resources of pharmaceutical companies are spent on marketing and promotion. Annually, the industry invests twice as much in marketing as it does in research and development. The most recent public records show that the top eleven drug corporations invested over $100,000 billion during the year while only about $50 billion went to research and development.
It seems to me that, if the drugs produced by these corporations were having the positive results claimed, physicians and medical institutions would not need to be convinced by marketing campaigns costing billions of dollars. The exorbitant costs of cancer treatment drugs are driven more by the expense of their promotion to their users than by their research and development expenses.
Pharmaceutical marketers argue that it takes this level of marketing expenditures to differentiate their products from those of other companies. They say that the high stakes business of big pharma necessitates the multi-billion dollar marketing expenses in order to stay competitive. However, the cartel-like nature of the industry allows it to function somewhat like the utilities industry. Companies agree to stake out segments of the market where they perform best and claim virtually exclusive rights to that segment. There is just enough competition in each segment to keep it from becoming monopolistic. Supposedly, the industry polices itself to protect the consumer against price fixing and profiteering.
In my opinion, the real reason that big pharma spends so much on marketing is to ensure that medical practitioners, institutions, and patients see and hear nothing other than their options for solutions to health issues. Their messages are to convince all concerned that the answer to cancer is promulgation of more and better chemical drugs. What we need is more research and development of new options, especially natural, non-toxic options. I invite your opinion.