It’s not really fair to point at Tesla’s $0 advertising and say drug companies should do the same. It’s a luxury product. People are excited by Tesla. They want one, they like to discuss the merits of it, and the product appeals to the affluent tech crowd that naturally gravitate to social media. When/if Tesla starts selling outside of that demographic, they’re going to have to start paying for marketing because then they’ll be directly competing with Ford, Honda, etc.
Yeah, Tesla may not have a “traditional” marketing budget for TV and print ads, but I bet that if you dug deep enough you’d find that they have a lot of staff dedicated to “creating buzz” and getting their name in the news as much as inhumanly possible.
And when the light is turned to the companies for scrutiny, about drug costs, and they are like, we spend 6 billion on R&D! It is expensive, but they spend 12 Billion on ads that most doctors would agree shouldn’t exist… it is hard to see the pharma companies trying to defend this. It will be cut down.
But the point that you keep missing is that those companies at least THINK that they are making MORE than $12 billion in increased sales as a result of that expenditure. Unless you have some evidence that they are incorrect in their assessment of their own business, then saying they should reduce that expenditure has no rational basis.
I mean, you can say, “Well they should just go their marketing better!” but that’s just an empty statement. Maybe they should just do their R&D better, and not pursue any drugs that are going to fail at later stages of clinical testing! That’s not how any of this works. If they knew how to do any of this stuff better, then they would be doing it better.
Or you could just ban it. Problem solved.
This is just wrong. That isn’t how the world even works. So many times the status quo wins out with thinking like that. Why build planes? Cars work just fine! Cars? Horses have worked for thousands of years! So many companies have folded holding on to the status quo (look at the american auto industry).
I would agree that they may think they are making the right choice, but to say that they are definitely running things good because that is the way things are is missing the point. Obviously the companies are profitable, but they probably could be more so, and I am sure there are people in those companies thinking that exact same thing.
I think banning prescription drug advertising to the public again would be a great start.
I don’t understand what you’re talking about here. The reason we didn’t build cars, or planes, was because we didn’t know how. Once we knew how, then we started doing that, because it was better.
To be clear, I didn’t say that they were doing things optimally. I said they were doing things the best they know how.
Indeed, they are almost certainly not doing things optimally. But improvement is something that takes a great deal of effort most of the time. It’s not something that you can just decide. They can’t just do their marketing better. They’d have to figure out HOW to do their marketing better.
I don’t get it. The point of marketing is to increase market share. For pharmaceuticals, the market is already defined: The people with the condition the drug will cure. You don’t want to be giving it to people who don’t need it, nor do you want people diagnosing themselves. Doctors should know which medicine to prescribe to treat you. These are not widgets. Another example why running health care like any other commodity is a bad idea.
If marketing drugs didn’t work, they wouldn’t do it, and we wouldn’t be talking about it. Having said that, there are lot of countries with tighter restrictions on marketing drugs than the US, and I think these companies make money there too… maybe not with 72% profit or so though.
Depends on the ‘you’. For pharmaceutical companies this is probably exactly what they want. From a public health/ spending perspective, however, you absolutely do not.
Sure you do. That’s just more money. You’re somehow mixing morality with business.
Yep, this is exactly what the pharm companies want. They don’t care if you’re using it incorrectly. They still get paid.
So now it seems Shkreli has offered Kanye $10 million if he releases his new album exclusively to him. As the article notes, if Kanye is considering the offer, he’d better insist on a cashier’s check.
Absolutely no marketing for prescription medicines in the UK. Even the Over The Counter advertisments are very strictly regulated.
Kanye should do it, and then just release a “Best of Kanye’s album that dickhead bought” album with the exact same songs on it.
Is /mu/ someone’s handle? I think I followed that, but man that was a confusing layout. I’m getting to old to internet.
It’s a 4chan thing. You aren’t missing anything. At all.
/mu/ is one of the sub-boards of 4chan, dedicated to, well, music.
Cataloguing 4chan posts sucks hard, because all links to individual threads eventually decay and die. Instead, you pretty much have to A) hope the thread becomes popular enough to get caught by one of the semi-automatic archive webpages that’ll store it in more or less 4chan format for posterity, or B) take screencaps of the individual posts you think are most worthwhile (because, of course, any thread of even moderate popularity on 4ch will explode with dozens or hundreds of shit-tier comments from the bottom-barrel scum of humanity) and arrange them as you see fit.
Option B is made harder, of course, by two obnoxious traits in 4ch: linked images (often the most worthwhile part of a post, or at least a key to understanding some of the weirder ones) don’t really display well in-line, so you need to open the link separately, screencap that, and work it into your screencaps of individual posts somehow; and also, there isn’t real quoting support, so replies just link back to the post you replied to with a nasty looking link titled the same as the original post’s post-number. Thanks to the second, you really need to do a good job of reorganizing your screencapped posts to make clear who is replying to who and where the “threads” of replies lie.
AKA, everything about the experience of trying to catalogue and archive 4ch posts is terrible, but god bless the folks who manage to capture the (exceedingly) rare good stuff, so that the rest of us don’t have to actually visit that shithole of a website :-D
Thanks for the info guys, that was really helpful! I’ve seen screen capture explosions like that but never really could follow them (without way more effort than I was willing to put in, at least) so it’s nice to know what and why.