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The friendly face of multinational drug pushers

As usual the world of health has thrown me several juicy topics to consider over the last week or so.

There was yet another fake food scandal in the UK – further eroding trust in even the most basic foods that we buy.

There was also the US recall of Uncle Ben’s Infused Rice products, sold in 5- and 25-pound catering bags, after people broke out in burning, itching rashes as well as headaches and nausea after eating the company’s Mexican flavour infused rice.

All of Uncle Ben’s infused products have been recalled as a precaution. It is speculation, rather than proven fact, that the rice contained excessive levels of niacin, or Vitamin B3 (US rice is required to be fortified with this nutrient) and that this was behind the illness.

Interestingly, there was a similar outbreak of Uncle Ben’s-related illness in December 2013 in Illinois and also in October 2013 in North Dakota. Which begs the question: how many people have to get sick before a company takes action?

It all goes to show that you can never trust the friendly face on the box.

This brings me neatly to the point I really want to make.

New research this week shows that Big Pharma has begun to aggressively embrace the concept of “brand personality” – a marketing strategy traditionally employed by consumer-focused companies like Apple, Coca-Cola and Harley-Davidson.

By imbuing their brands with human characteristics, pharmaceutical companies can become models of corporate personhood and boost sales by developing ‘relationships’ with their consumers. The result: people are more likely to ask their physician to prescribe specific brand-name medication.

Brand personalities, according to the scientists at Concordia University can transform products from being merely functional to having emotional value in the eyes of the consumer.

Companies such as Pfizer, Eli Lilly and GlaxoSmithKline give their brands personality traits that help ‘blockbuster’ brand names like Viagra, Lipitor and Prozac become shorthand for the drugs themselves.

In my experience, brand personalities usually take one of a few tried and tested forms such as:

THE FRIEND, where billion, or even trillion dollar, multinational companies downplay their size and try to “meet people where they are” by giving practical friendly advice about health care.

THE HEALTH FACILITATOR whose message is less about one-to-one and more about being solution-oriented and caring for the community.

THE GLOBAL HEALTH MENTOR where drug companies reframe their invasion into foreign markets and global health initiatives that help the poor.

The pharmaceutical brand personality, however isn’t just about selling more stuff, it’s about getting away with more stuff too.

Turning a drug into a friend or a facilitator or a mentor means we question them less. We cut them slack when they don’t deserve it and we turn a blind eye when they hurt or harm us.

In the same way, turning companies into people in the eyes of US law has granted corporations inestimable freedom to pursue their own, sometimes toxic, agendas without fear of prosecution.

It has allowed them to bribe and to influence government policy to an egregious degree and never be called out or punished and to buy their way out of every problem or uncomfortable challenge (witness the corporate dollars being poured into preventing GMOs from being labelled).

Giving drugs ‘personalities’ is just another step along this road to hell.

We are already a seriously over-medicated world. In the US 40% of people over age 60 were taking 5 medications or more – a finding echoed by national figures from the US Centres for Disease Control data which show 37% of adults over 60 taking 5 or more medications.

In the UK more than 20% of adults over the age of 70 are taking five or more drugs.

In the UK we are not (yet) so inundated with direct to consumer drug ads. Where such ads exist it takes conscious awareness not to be brainwashed by them.

However they rebrand themselves, however much they ‘reach out’ to consumers and potential customers, however much they invest in heart wrenching or comedic or ‘straight talking TV commercials, pharmaceutical companies and the drugs they make are a major cause of preventable deaths in the developed world.

And as drugs become more dangerous, maybe it is, as our guest comment this week from Prof T. Colin Campbell of Cornell University suggests (see right), time to take more seriously the notion of “let food be thy medicine”.

He means actual food by the way. Not the kind that needs the ‘brand personality’ of a smiling older uncle (who never existed in the first place), to inveigle its way onto your dinner table.

Pat Thomas, Editor