Indian Pharma Watch : Advertisement and Brand Identity

In the years that I have run a pharmacy, I have seen that the otherwise value-conscious feisty Indian consumer, is clueless about Indian Pharmaceutical Companies. Ask them to name one, and most won't be able to name a single one. It also doesn't help that Dilip Singhvi, owner of Sun Pharma, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, is so media shy and illusive to public, that when an average Indian is asked to name a few billionaire businessmen in India, the list invariably  ends with the Tata-Birla-Ambanis, and never Singhvi. That Sun Pharma is so massive and that its owner is so wealthy, is a little known fact for most Indian consumers. In the manner that products of Tata Sons, a billion dollar generation old Tata family run conglomerate, enjoy trust of Indian consumers, Sun Pharma does not.  

Most Indian pharmaceutical companies were also absent from the advertisement scene, till 2017, with the exception of a few OTC drugs - mainly dominated by Saridon (owned by Piramal Enterprise, a multi combination drug for headache) Gelusil and Digene (owned by GSK and Pfizer, popular antacid pill, which costs 1 INR per tablet). Even with these, the name of the manufacturing company is usually kept inconspicuous - so it is not really Pfizer's Gelusil or Glaxo Smith Line's Pfizer.

2017 in many ways marked a tectonic shift in how Indian pharma companies erupted in the advertisement scene all of a sudden.

Mankind Pharma, the third largest pharma company in India, roped in superstar Amitabh Bachchan as their brand ambassador sometime around 2017 with a tagline "quality medicines at affordable prices" and began a major campaign across all media. This move came around the time the Indian Government passed a stringent law, instructing doctors to write the molecular composition of prescribed medicines, and not the brand names. In reality, however, the rule didn't hold water for too long. Though mandatory for every pharmacy to have a Pharmacist, most shops run without one in reality. The Indian Doctors Association lobbied with the government that pharmacies would provide wrong medicine to the patients, due to their inexperience and ineptitude to understand generic names, and that would adversely impact the patient's health. The rule was then mellowed down where it was mandatory for the doctor to provide the brand name as well as the composition - though in reality, slowly doctors went back to writing only the brand names.  In general, most doctors strictly instruct patients, verbally or through written instructions on the prescriptions, to not substitute the brand names from the ones that they have provided in the prescriptions, and in my experience, I have seen that very few patients do that, except the extremely well-informed, well educated consumers, who form a minuscule percentage of the entire population. 

It is my understanding that Mankind's move was to bolster the brand value of the company as a pre-emptive branding exercise, should there be a situation that the Indian Pharmaceutical ecosystem moved to a system where indeed doctors prescribed generic compositions. 

But then, why was it that only Mankind Pharma that undertook this campaign and not the other pharmaceutical companies, including India's biggest one, Sun Pharma? There's a catch here - Mankind's drugs are the cheapest in almost every category it manufactures. Take for example, Panteprazole + Domperidone combination, where the leading brand is Alkem Pharma's Pan-D, that costs about INR 180 for 15 tablets, whereas Mankind's Pantakind DSR costs a paltry INR 32. Should Indian consumers move to buying generic medicines, Mankind, with its massive competitive advantage in pricing, could turn out to be the biggest gainer. With apps like netmeds and 1mg.com, that provide substitutes and price comparison charts of same medicines with different brand names, and the huge penetration of mobile phones and internet in India, information on medicines would become more and more accessible to Indian consumers. Mankind Pharma definitely stands to gain the most in the changed ecosystem.

 

One of India's much older drug companies, Cipla, however, didn't really go the Mankind way with a sole-agenda of brand creation. Cipla's advertisement promotes only its pulmonary medicine division, mainly inhalers, and combines with the products, its own brand identity. This is interesting, mainly because Cipla is a much smaller company than Mankind and Sun Pharma, but it is still the brand leader in the Inhaler category. In my experience, Indian consumers do not want to buy three items in a doctor's prescription - (i) anti depressants and anxiety relieving psychiatric medicines (commonly understood as "sleeping pills") (ii) Insulins for diabetic patients, and (iii) inhalers - mainly because it is widely perceived by Indians that once one begins usage of any of these, it would be impossible to discontinue them and hence, even against doctors advice, a large of patients chose not to use these products. With India's increasing air pollution problem, the chest medicine market in India is likely to increase and with it, the need for inhalers.  By comfortably nudging consumers to buy inhalers, especially children, when prescribed, and then, creating a brand awareness and trust for its manufacturer - Cipla's advertisements very cleverly merged the dual purposes in one go. 

When I began working in the pharmaceutical industry, my only regret was how little pharmaceutical companies were present in the advertisement scene. I loved advertisement, and there was pretty much nothing to study for pharma companies - everything happened behind closed doors between medical representatives of these companies and doctors, where the reps promoted and lobbied for their products. Now with pharma companies overtaking the advertisement space in India, I am not complaining !

Hammer Down Advertisement

There isn't a term like hammer down advertisement. I coined it now, because, well, I couldn't think of a term that is used to describe repeated advertisement of a product across various channels to a target customer group.

But well, you get the sense, don't you ? Show the ad on so many forum that you have to hammer it down the brain of the customers. Hard and Solid. Bang Bang - so strong that a customer cannot potentially escape it.

Recently, I have been watching a lot of Vlogs by Indian Youtubers. Most of them are inane stories of housewives and homemakers, videoing their day as they go about running around with their ordinary chores. Then, this brand, Mama Earth first makes an appearance through sponsored endorsement in one blog. And slowly, each week, I find one youtuber after another, promoting the same brand (but different products). Most of these youtubers are Vlog-styled youtubers, and almost put up similar content- so I am guessing they have similar viewer base.

Now, I have reached a point that I wonder I could watch a channel with similar content on Youtube, and not escape a Mama Earth Product endorsement.

But then, it is so efficient as a strategy.  The multiple product placement strategy clutters up the memory of the customer, and one learns to ignore them - I honestly wouldn't want to buy any of them. But if the advertisement is so specific and so perseverant, in the way Mama Earth has done it, then it is almost impossible to ignore the product.

In the million of hours that I spent on Youtube, I have never really clicked on any link to check a product. With Mama Earth, it is a first. That's quite a thing, yo

Homo Sapiens

How does one write a book review when one has forgotten the good first half of the book ? I hadn't been reading seriously for all of 2018, and then yesterday, in a desperate attempt to get back to shape intellectually, I downloaded a habit building app, and put in 30 minutes of reading slots everyday. It worked (and it always works for me - these habit building apps, that is), and I blizzarded through the last 150 pages history of mankind in Yuval Harari's "Homo Sapiens".

The book's really popular, has great ratings on Goodreads, and comes recommended from Bill Gates himself. Equally true to that superstar status - is that book is kind of lame and bland. It is my conspiracy theory that Bill Gates, in an effort to nudge us to read more books, adds a lot of dumb and easy to read books in his book recommendations, much like mothers world over discreetly add veggies to children's food. Look, eating vegetable is good for you, even if Nestle tries to tell you that Maggi veg noodles is actually both vegetable and good, just as Bill Gates probably thinks reading is good for less-smarter people like us, even if it's sort of Chetan Bhagat types, it's still a book. Everyone has a paternalistic agenda, these days !

The book is essentially what I call the "summary types" - which would basically is a lot of Wikipedia, made into small capsules of trivia, written well into a a lot of trivia compiled into one smooth flowing book. Though there has been some criticism about how the author actually believed that the agricultural revolution wasn't a good, I honestly don't recall that part of the book. However, I remember Harari mentioning that since there was an entire travel industry, supported by improvement in our public transport system, waiting to flourish, the narrative that travel was a way to enlightenment came about. So let's be clear - no one really said that travel wasn't good, when we didn't have steam engines. While it is true that the entire instagram-facebook jungle promotes a view that staying in a good hotel, and travelling around the globe (while slogging in a boring soul-less job, which life is not shared on social media) is a great noble quality in one, it rarely isn't the kind of travel that leads to an experience, as opposed to a pleasant memory. 

The last chapter of the book culminates into one large question what makes one happy.By then, I had lost it. Almost, when I lost it here, on this article.

Imposter Syndrome

At that point, till 'Lean In' happened, it didn't matter how often and how bored I felt, by the constant repetitions and lack of substantive content in these book, what remained constant was that I simply couldn't get myself to wrap up reading on grounds that the books weren't good enough. Instead, I always ended up thinking that it was me who wasn't good enough. Think of it, this way - if I were a serious reader, wouldn't I be able to finish a book cover to cover, even if I found them mediocre ? Would I ever be taken seriously by serious readers if I ever disclosed to them that I cannot often read certain type of books, end to end ? Every time I would reach a stage when I knew the books would have gone repetitive, I would keep them by my bedside, and keep reading, every now and then flipping to the end page to see how far I was from the end - because if I didn't finish reading till the last word, someone would see me or I would get caught in a conversation somewhere on the planet, and wouldn't be taken seriously. There was this fear - a constant fear - and quite crippling at times, to sift through a book I had clearly considered mediocre or unworthy, just for the fear of being exposed.

It seems what I felt was the 'imposter syndrone' about which I might have heard earlier may be, but basically got around to knowing that it was a real thing, especially one which women suffer from quite a bit. It isn't a fancy thing - just one where one feels inferior and absolutely incapable of internalizing achievement and constantly lives under fear of being "outed" as a fraud. Sandberg drives home a point that women suffer more from Imposter Syndrome, than men do and cites an example from her life where her brothers were always more confident than she was. It wasn't until my younger brother almost laughed off at me for reading Bus-Pop end to end, that I realized between a white Jewish woman living in America and an Indian brown women living in India - there wasn't much of a gender construct difference, for, we both had brothers that did have more confidence than we did. My brother, almost non-nonchalantly mentioned to me, that it wasn't ever necessary to really read Bus-Pop with much seriousness, and that if one skimmed through the book and heard the author's interview or talk on Google or Ted, it was just about enough. 

Since then, and much later, I read Virginia Woolf's "A room on one's own', where Woolf mentions says if Shakespeare had a sister, an imaginary Judith Shakespeare, who was brought up differently from William Shakespeare - say, she was told she could not write poetry because women are not good poets, or that she could not be good at mathematics because women are not good at STEM - would she write in the manner that male William Shakespeare did and be as successful as William was ? Most probably not. In the worlds of William and Judith, Sheryl and her brothers, and me and my brother - it was the same story everywhere - the lack of access of knowledge, and even the courage and ease to pursue it, gets so truncated and difficult and often, impossible, if you are a woman. Woolf in her book mentions how hundreds of men have written about women, and on women, and as woman, as their lead characters, but so few women have been able to write about themselves.

Years and years, it angered me.  When I was told my men I had dated, that they found me intellectually stimulating for my knowledge of humanities, but "aggressive" when I refused to be part of a patriarchal rituals like Rakhi Bandhan or Bhai Duuj (which are Indian gendered festivals where women celebrate and pray for the long lives of their male siblings, and not vice versa). The fact that I could not think and choose my own identity - from gender to religion - was allowed only in theory, but not in practice. My parents have often told that I was more aggressive than my brother in my refusal to follow social norms - because even refusal to participate in any social norm that was clearly inequal or patriarchal must be done with politeness. 

Understanding my anger as a woman was easy, because I was a woman, and clearly a minority in most gender equations. My anger, legitimate, as also the anger of women, of colour or religion, different from mine, also equally legitimate, was a narrative I could relate to. That was a happy space, in my late twenties, when I had come to make peace with my anger, and felt no shame in my behaviour, but early thirties, brought in another dimension - what about anger of a group, who was alien to me, and in which matrix, where I was a majoritarian privileged group. 

When I first read Ahmbedkar's 'Annihilation of Caste' and compared it to everything I had read by Nehru and Gandhi after this realization, I was able to rationalise Ahmedkar's 'angry' style of writing for the first time, as opposed to the much smoother style of style by more privileged Nehru and Gandhi.I had almost discarded once in my late teens dalit author Kancha Illiah's 'Why I am not a Hindu' as a book without merit, and now, after a decade, I realised that I was the William Shakespeare, and he was the Judith in this case. Then, the peace I had felt, from the finding my voice in Judith, was replaced by the guilt I felt upon my discovery that I have been ignoring many Judiths all my life. 

Subway down the road

I discovered Subway circa 2003, in a store inside Brigade Mall on Brigade Road, Bangalore, a city where I had moved in from Calcutta to finish my graduation. My first order was placed with the help of a friend, who walked me through the various options of bread, sauce and vegetables, which I was completely unaware of and I was worried if all that was worth the effort, since the Sub came for the same price as a sumptuous plate of Chicken Biriyani from nearby iconic Meghna Biriyani. Even then, Subway was expensive for the amount of food it served to large-portion eaters, and continues to be almost equally priced now, that means a non-veg Sub costs as much as a plate of Chicken Biriyani. 

For me, growing up in middle class Calcutta in a socially upwardly mobile family of Bangladeshi Post Partition refugee background, to moving to Bangalore to study, Subway was more like a rite of passage to a more elitist world - one needed to know what a Jalapeno was, and not pronounce it the way it is written - that is, Halapeno and not Jalepeno. And then know, everything from Parmesan Oregano to Honey Mustard to Black Olives. Subway demands its customers come well researched and well versed with its menu, even if it means losing customers (or never having them in the first place).

Over the years, nothing changed with Subway - on one side my middle class upbringing did not let me order anything other than the cheapest option of Sub Of the Day (the only option that costs less than a plate of Biryani), and on the other side, Subway's own determination to never change its looks,  taste and equal conviction to provide the same element of "choice" to customers in terms of breads, vegetables and sauces, even though its sales never looked up in India. The only thing that changed was that occasionally I began to crave a Sub over Biriyani and also, that my dietary needs changed from a perpetually hungry student to a more diet conscious small-sized-portion-eating working woman for whom a 6 inch Sub would suffice as a meal. 

Subway's latest advertisement on YouTube, still positions itself as a brand that provides freedom by giving the element of choice to its customers. Still, after so many years, it still has not understood that Indians do not seek such choice in a country of standardized menus - that go to the extent that multiple Indian curries in most restaurant serve the same gravy base. 

But really, what is the value of such freedom and choice for those who neither know the difference between mint mustard sauce and chipolata ? Of all the time I have spent at Subway stores, there's always the divide between those what a Halapeno is and those who get bewildered by a Jalapeno. If you thought customer was the king for a brand, then Subway's counter-intuitive strategies to continue to bewilder, confuse and belittle the consumer's lack of knowledge of its ingredients and processes. My parents, for example, refuse to ever pick up a Subway for me, even if they visit a mall, because they mind the entire process too complex and too elitist and too alienating for them. 

The idea of 'Choice' among consumers as Sheena Iyengar correctly pointed out in her book 'The Art of Choosing' is very much a subjective cultural term.  Much like most of the books written in business book genre to which her book belongs (Iyengar is a business school professor), the core idea was illustrated and re-illustrated and re-re-illustrated through multiple examples - one of which was the idea of choice in the soda market. In many countries, a store stocking a few brands of soda would mean the consumers are spoilt over choice, whereas in the US, unless an entire section is stocked with more than 20 varieties of soda, it isn't really much of a choice for a consumer. In the former type, the idea of having access to a soda drink was considered immense choice of consumers (who were indifferent to the brand differentiation that existed in the category - a soda drink was a soda drink, as long as they could just about get their hands on any), whereas in the more consumerist society, like the US, a stack of soda options, with minute differences in taste, constitute enough "choice" for the consumers.

In India, no one orders a salad without standard dish with variations - except occasionally asking for mellowing down the spice content of the gravy. A biriyani isn't a biriyani, if you ask it to be made in olive oil and with brown rice, and an Idli is a Idli, served the same way all over India. 

Why then doesn't Subway understand that no one seeks choice in a sandwich, and that too a choice of items unknown to local palette and local taste? With its sales not growing world over, it almost seems like Subway is on its way to a dead end.