I’ve been doing some work recently on the fashion within pharma: fashionable brand names, the fashion of typefaces, and how consumers clamor for—or reject the notion of—different treatment modalities (wearables, auto-injectors, etc.).

Consumers like products with shock value, or at least novelty. This is something we’ve known within marketing for decades. And just when you thought everything had been tried, a new era of products with cheeky sayings has been basking in incredible success for several years now. It’s as if a product that ‘talks’ to you as the consumer is a cross-industry winning lottery ticket for sales revenue.

This should remind us again that consumers are embarrassingly predictable and suggestible. Consumerism and fashion trends also work where the punchline isn’t explicitly obvious. So there are indeed Tesla vehicle models S, 3, X. The “3” was chosen in lieu of “E” in an attempt at a clever lexicographical effect; entrepreneurs don’t need to be necessarily smart, they just need to reliably display sociopathic traits.*

Drugs as fashion
How does this influences human health across great swaths of the population? Let’s look at drugs as fashion. There’s a certain fashion associated with which drugs are explored and which conditions receive preferential treatment. Typically when a new mechanism of action is discovered, or a particular disease receives outsized public attention, that drives investigational resources down particular—and not random or averaged—paths. So please get the idea out of your mind that the most-needed therapies get the most attention or that any treatment has an equal chance of being pioneered. It’s just not true.

In this way, it’s entirely possible that social media campaigns and diseases that receive outsized levels of attention—perhaps because of a vocal ambassador or whatever—can drive resources away from the most debilitating medical conditions. Remember, those who pioneer causes are doing so agnostically of all other competing causes. So, by example, if we could create a prioritization matrix of all diseases and disorders measuring multivariate factors like prevalence, incidence, impact on daily function, pain, and so on, we would have a rational list of where to assign resources to do the most good—on average. Because this is never how social causes are approached, dollars that are allocated to a particular cause are done so at the expense of other, probably more deserving, causes. There are some econometrics influences in the above argument and economics effects that create a bit of variance. For example, the total number of ‘social cause dollars’ is finite, and therefore every dollar put on cause “A” is not available for cause “B.” But there’s also a behavioral economics effect where simply seeing others behave in a ‘social-cause-conscious’ fashion will cause people to also donate more than they otherwise would have—thus opening up more available funding than would otherwise be there in a rational economics model.

So whether it’s a new drug delivery method, a new mechanism of action or a new type of viral social marketing, these all have discrete and real impacts on consumerism, and by extension, future pipelines of therapies. Over time, groupings of self-similar categories of attributes form the cyclical basis of fashion. Just like if you watch a movie from 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago, you can detect “fashionicity”—the property of displaying a recognizable pattern of fashion. Now think about this. When you look at blocks of time in the approval and use of drug treatments, and all medical interventions, for that matter, there are periods of time—marked periodicity—where self-similar categories emerge with competitors (e.g., SSRI-class antidepressants, cholesterol statins, etc.). These miniature periods of drug industry fashion bring with them dramatic potential help to patients who would be served by them. They also are harbingers of lost opportunity for other treatments that were marginalized to bring them to market.

We might like to think that the ‘right’ drug developed for an emergent need would be uptaken by society (the patients) just by virtue of its existence. But it wouldn’t be to a large degree. And if by chance it was, this would be a clear and strong indicator against the need for sales and marketing folks in pharma. Having a good product, a good message marketed well, and a situation where they align with the capricious and irresolute perceived needs of the public is a sales trifecta.

It’s clear that despite best intentions, consumerism is alive and well and has incredible influence on what new treatments go through the pipeline and eventually achieve market release. 

*Incidentally, it should be noted that psychopathy isn’t a reliable medical diagnosis; so although you or your colleagues may toss this term around or hear it on a regular basis, a specifier for psychopathy only first appeared a handful of years ago in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) V. The World Health Organization and the American Psychiatric Association also disfavor the term.

References

1. Locwin, B. (2017). What’s in a Name? The Psychology of Drug Naming Conventions. Public speech presented at Future Pharma, Austin TX.
2. DeMers, J. (2018). Do psychopaths make better entrepreneurs? Entrepreneur.