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.
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 !
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