It is a tad disconcerting to open the June 9 issue of the august business publication Fortune and find an article on erectile dysfunction in which two female corporate executives are wearing boxing gloves and staring at me.
Yikes.
But “Taking on Viagra” does have a reason to beckon Nancy Bryan, a Bayer Corp.’s vice president, and Bonnie Rosello, a vice president at GlaxoSmithKline and put them back to back. Their two pharmaceutical giants are teaming to take on Pfizer’s Viagra, the most dominant new drug brand of the last decade.
John Simons does a strong job taking us inside a big-time competitive battle, and chronicling drug industry changes that now mean the first product out of the gate, as was the case with Viagra, isn’t assured of ultimate victory.
“With the help of extensive clinical trials, head-to-head lab studies of competing drugs, and Information Age market surveys, nowhere is Peter Drucker’s famous theory about `creative imitators’ ruling markets more apt. Bryan aims to do to Viagra what Tylenol and ibuprofen did to Bayer’s icon of old, aspirin.”
It’s not that simple a task, especially since Pfizer is the industry’s top dog and seen as the most adroit marketer. But the impotence drug to be peddled by Bayer and GSK, called Levitra and already sold in Europe, is only one of two challengers to Viagra, the other being Eli Lilly’s soon-to-surface Cialis.
The most interesting facet of this faceoff may be a fact that is a surprise: Viagra, for all its hype, is not even one of the drug industry’s top 10 sellers, since only an estimated 13 percent of men believed to suffer from erectile dysfunction have asked their doctors for it. And those Bob Dole ads gave it a fine initial push but also left the impression that it was an older person’s drug, which is why Viagra has turned to younger men, especially baseball star Rafael Palmeiro, 38, for promotion’s sake.
The reality of a potentially far larger market is what is spurring the competition, which seeks to figure out ways to prod men into seeking help. For example, the research done by Bayer and GSK concludes that hawking Levitra in Spain will be tougher than in the U.S., since just 10 percent of Spanish men admit to suffering ED, compared with 22 percent of American men.
“For Bryan, then, the calculus is simple: Cure the coyness; grow the market.” The battle plan is detailed here. Quickly: It’s self-obsession week at the newsweeklies, as Time focuses on Hillary Clinton’s Bill-lied-to-me disclosures in her new book (it gets an unrevealing extra interview with her, presumably due to previous leaks which undermined this print “exclusive”); U.S. News & World Report soberly highlights how America has never been fatter and why shifts in the way we think about our weight are crucial to reverse the trend; and Newsweek is all about men’s health and the latest science in the field, including, yes, on impotence. … A special summer weddings issue of InStyle includes experts supposedly innovative tips, including using a wallpaper runway rather than a cloth runner, jazzing up the ceremony with musicians playing jazz as you enter, facing the guests as the big moment is officiated and giving as presents a music box engraved with the couple’s names, wedding date and playing a song from the wedding (the later idea is via Chicago event planner Stanley Horwich). … July’s World Press Review includes international response to Fidel Castro’s crackdown on dissidents, with the Czech independent weekly Respekt indicating “an unusually unified protest” nationwide “with the exception of the communists.” … The July Reason, the libertarian monthly, explores the general claim of liberal media bias but falls short in coming up with any coherent conclusion, other than that the right and left both are guilty of whining about the others’ supposed influence. A more engaging effort is Doug Bandow making the case for the U.S. exiting South Korea and not worrying nearly so much about North Korea, “a distant and poor country surrounded by far more powerful states, [which is] an economic irrelevancy and a diplomatic nonentity.”
Rather than threatening North Korea with war and possibly increasing our military forces in the Pacific, Bandow contends, we should bring our troops home “and turn the problem of Pyongyang over to its neighbors, where it belongs.”… In the June 12 New York Review of Books, Russell Baker bemoans a most underwhelming memoir by David Rockefeller of his most famous and surely fascinating family, concluding, “For nearly 500 pages he persists in telling too little while showing even less. His book is all bones and no flesh, no blood, or tears, or even cheap sentimentality.” Elsewhere in the issue, Harvard’s estimable Stanley Hoffmann eviscerates Bush administration foreign policy, notably the invasion of Iraq, including making a rather persuasive case that its deep suspicion of international organizations is shortsighted. “It is sad to have to remind those who endorse such positions [such as the U.S. reserving the right to pick and choose which international laws and institutions to support] that in a world consisting of almost two hundred states of very uneven strength and cohesion, and where the many forms of interdependence reduce the actual sovereignty of all, a pure and simple return to the rule of the strongest would be a catastrophic regression. It would promote insecurity, not security or moderation.”
This very clear cautionary note should be read by those now inclined to back the notion of the U.S. flexing its historically unprecedented military, economic and technological muscle, and who believe that that we have a moral imperative to essentially take charge of much of the world and kick butt when we see fit.
