Big Tobacco’s lessons for Big Food

In the good old days, the tobacco industry had a strategic marketing playbook script that worked something like this:

  • emphasize personal responsibility for choosing to smoke
  • pay scientists to deliver research that instills doubt about risks
  • criticize the “junk science” that finds harms associated with smoking
  • make self-regulatory pledges
  • lobby with massive resources to stifle government action
  • introduce “safer” products
  • simultaneously manipulate and deny both the addictive nature of tobacco products and marketing said products to children

The compelling question asked by researchers Drs. Kelly Brownell and Kenneth Warner is this: How does the script of the modern food industry compare to that tobacco industry script?  Continue reading

“We never imagined people would think of osteopenia as a disease”

Here’s a drug marketing plan that is dazzling in its brilliant effectiveness. I’m thinking of including it in any future PR workshops I do on marketing communications. It’s a plan to sell pills to treat something called osteopenia, a condition that only recently started to be thought of as a problem that even needs treatment.

It’s a plan to convince consumers and their physicians that these pills should be in the medicine cabinets of millions of women worldwide.

But more broadly, it’s a plan to change the definition of what a disease is, and the role that drug companies can play in that change.  Continue reading

How a British university sold out to a drug company

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A few years ago, Sheffield University in the U.K. offered over $250,000 to one of its senior medical professors if he would agree to stop criticizing the drug company that was giving research money to the university’s medical school.

For several years, bone metabolism specialist Dr. Aubrey Blumsohn had been complaining to his university about scientific misconduct around a contract between Sheffield and the U.S.-based drug company, Procter & Gamble Pharmaceuticals. Blumsohn claimed that the company had denied him access to his own key research data on the P&G drug Actonel, and then tried to ghostwrite his analysis of it for publication.   Continue reading