Wall Street Journal - Drug Makers Offer Consumers Coupons for Free Prescriptions

The Wall Street Journal published a series of articles on innovation in the pharmaceutical industry in March 2002. Bristol-Myers Squibb, an Imaginatik client, was covered in these articles and a number of innovative direct-to-consumer marketing approaches were described. Most of these innovations have been impacted by Idea Central, either as the idea capture tool (collecting ideas from sales and marketing representatives around the company), or as the idea evaluation and search tool (managing ideas generated from face-to-face brainstorming sessions with internal marketing groups and ad agencies). For information on the Imaginatik project at Bristol-Myers Squibb, please read Innovation at BMS. Note that the article is available for purchase online at WSJ.

Drug Makers Offer Consumers Coupons for Free Prescriptions

By GARDINER HARRIS
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
March 13, 2002

Drug makers still pour hundreds of millions of dollars into slick TV ads each year, but the latest strategy for advertising new drugs is distinctly low tech: coupons.

Pharmaceutical companies are offering free one-week or even one-month supplies of drugs to treat everything from diabetes to acid reflux. They hope to get patients to persuade their doctors to prescribe a new therapy or let them switch from an old drug. The drug makers are sending the coupons through the mail and in e-mails, and printing them in newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Health magazine. Many also can be found on the Internet at sites such as Viagra.com, Clarinex.com and Purplepill.com.

Like TV drug ads, the coupons are intended to push patients into physicians' offices. But they put more pressure on doctors because patients get discounts only if the physician prescribes the exact drug listed on the coupon. The practice has become particularly popular recently with drug companies launching new versions of aging drugs. The companies use the coupons to sell patients on the idea of switching to the new formulations before generic competitors overwhelm the old versions.

"Patients hand in their coupon to their doctor, they get their free trial and if it works they can go back to their doctor and discuss it further," says Rachel Bloom-Baglin, a spokeswoman for AstraZeneca PLC. The company is using a coupon campaign to promote its heartburn drug, Nexium, which is replacing the older Prilosec. "The whole aim of the coupon is really to educate the appropriate people," she says.

Probably the most successful drug-company coupon campaign so far was mounted by Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. Last year, the company launched a broad campaign aimed at persuading users of its very successful diabetes drug, Glucophage , to switch to a once-daily version of the same drug, Glucophage XR, or to a combination pill, Glucovance. According to Competitive Media Reporting, Bristol-Myers spent $81 million last year on an ad campaign for XR and Glucovance that included coupons.

The campaign turned the new diabetes drugs into big sellers. The two drugs together booked more than $633 million in sales in 2001. Sander A. Flaum, chief executive of Robert A. Becker, an ad consulting firm, says the campaign piqued the interest of diabetics because it offered a new, once-a-day therapy free of charge. Diabetics are also disproportionately poor, so they may find coupons especially enticing.

The long-term success of Bristol-Myers's campaign will be determined over the next several months when patients who switched to the newer therapies -- perhaps because of the one-month free offer -- decide whether to switch back to cheap generics of Glucophage, which went on the market in January.

Copyright 2002 Wall Street Journal.