I used a throw-a-way for this because I don't like associating my work with Reddit. This isn't really a secret though, it's just that people have a powerful response to branding that I never knew about until I witnessed it.
A few years ago, we were making one of the top selling medicines. Doesn't matter what it was, but if I wrote the name, you'd likely know it. It was near the end of it's patent protection, so the company that developed the medicine and owned the patent cut a deal with a generic pharmaceutical company and allowed them to also market the medicine even before the patent protection expired on the branded product. This allowed the generic company to get into the market earlier and gain market share ahead of other generic competitors and the benefit to the company owning the patent for the branded medicine was royalties from the sales of this generic product for some period of time.
So we made all the medicine in the same room in the same factory with the same ingredients from the same sources of supply on the same machines with the same people operating them. The only difference was that we put some of the tablets in the branded box and some in the generic box. So the only difference was the box.
Then all of it shipped out to drug stores where it was sold at different prices, depending on if it was in the branded box or the generic box. And here is the most remarkable part of the story about the power of branding. We would get customer complaints about various problems with the medicine, whether real or perceived. Missing tablets, broken tablets, funny looking tablets, etc, for some common examples. All these tablets were made in the same place, just in different boxes, so we should have seen equal rates of complaints, but we didn't. We got something like 10 times the amount of customer complaints for the tablets that went in the generic box and cost less. This is an understood phenomenon, nobody was surprised about it. People have some kind of psychological response that makes them believe that something cheaper is inferior and something that costs more is of higher quality.
- I put the astrix because this isn't true of every generic medicine you buy. Most generic medicine is manufactured in a different place and sometimes it truly is inferior. In this case, the tablets were identical in appearance. If the tablets aren't identical in appearance, they're made somewhere else. Still, they're probably just as good. The medicine would be the same and the industry is highly regulated. There's not a lot of room for variation.
May 28, 2017 at 04:34AM
