<<This is an OTC medication. If this product really works, who really cares about the peer review process... This product will sink or swim on three things: Does it work, can the company effectively market it, and how does the competition stack up.>>
Mike, my "tiresome tirade of technicalities" (nice alliteration there, I like it) aims to examine exactly these three issues.
1) How do we know if a medical treatment works? Anecdotal evidence is worth something, perhaps quite a bit, but it's never as good as a well-designed double-blind clinical trial with statistically significant results. The placebo effect is so powerful that anecdotal reports often are simply misleading and wrong. Man invented science as we know it because science works better to answer our questions than the alternatives do.
2) Can the company effectively market the product? Well, the last filing shows only a very small amount of cash. I believe that Hall's spent something like $30 million marketing Zinc Defense, and still came up with a fraction of the market share claimed by Quigley. How did little old Quigley beat the category leader in just 2 years? They had two published clinical trials of zinc gluconate glycine lozenges showing tremendous results against the cold. Because the second of these reports was published in a prestigious journal, Quigley got a ton of free publicity. So the first two issues connect.
3) How does the competition stack up? Well, it depends on whether we're talking about Zicam (where Quigley is the obvious competitor, though surely not the only one in the broad cold field), dental gums (where Arm & Hammer seems to be the top competitor), or nicotine and diet gums. To stick with Zicam for now, consider that Quigley has a well-known brand, lots of cash for such a small company, hefty profit margins, a key patent, and two published clinical trials showing positive results (and one more recent one showing negative results).
Assuming GUMM could check off #1 and #2, then the competitive landscape could become interesting. But that's precisely what can't be assumed. |
