I watch a lot of TV. And the commercials aren't enough to add up to more than a small portion of what is claimed as "marketing and administration". "Administration" doesn't pay for those commercials, and even the marketing part is not solely directed towards them. I'm not writing it off as samples, obviously that's only part of it, but a much bigger part than you might think. And its not the only part of marketing, let alone "marketing and administration" that isn't useless, even the adds themselves aren't useless, and "marketing and administration goes far beyond those TV commercials.
Also marketing doesn't take away from R&D, it adds to it.
"...Well, we do spend a lot on marketing, that's for sure. US pharmaceutical sales in 2004 were about $235 billion. If these latest figures are correct, then promotion was about 24% of sales. I don't know how that compares to other industries, but it wouldn't surprise me if it ran high. Several things lead to that - the drug industry is quite fragmented, for one thing, with even the largest companies having a fairly small market share. And patent terms mean that the bulk of the profits on new drugs have to be earned back relatively quickly before they go generic. The distribution channels in the prescription drug business lead to a concentration on the gatekeepers (physicians) as well.
But the authors of this paper have missed an important concept. As I've pointed out here before, the idea of spending money on marketing is that it brings in more money in return. If it didn't, why bother? Marketing campaigns are supposed to pay for themselves, and more besides. That doesn't always work, of course - Prizer sure didn't make back the money spent promoting Exubera - but the failures are made up for by the successes, or at least they'd better be.
So it's not like we have this huge pile of money (X) and choose to divide it up so that we spend 0.65X buying ads and 0.35X on research. Those ads are responsible for the size of the pile in the first place. If they didn't exist, X would be smaller. If the advertising is working, that whole 0.65X is being paid for by increased sales: why on earth would you spend more on advertising than you make in return for it, year after year? And some of that 0.35X comes from those increased sales, too: why on earth would you spend that huge amount on advertising and get only that same amount back in revenues, year after year?
No, as far as I can see, most of the "why don't you spend some of that money on research" question is founded on a misconception..."
pipeline.corante.com
---
Prophets of profit
29 Jan 2008 03:42 pm
Yesterday I wrote:
So the most probable outcome of introducing monopsony power here [in the U.S.] is that the market for drugs shrinks to the point where it will support few-to-no new drugs.
Not to put too fine a point on it, Tom responded:
This seems crazy.
He is not the only one for whom this seems a little nuts. But it is not. Let me explain.
People who think that there will be continuing R&D in the pharmaceutical industry are basically thinking of it as a budgeting problem. They think of the pharmaceutical industry's gross income as a budget to be allocated between various functions, such as marketing and R&D. They may concede that by changing the size of the budget, you may shrink the amount of money to fund R&D, because there will be less money in the kitty. (Though many or most hope that shrinking the size of the pie will force pharmaceutical companies to transfer money from the advertising budget to R&D1). But, their reasoning goes, there will still be money in the kitty; if you allow pharmaceutical companies 1/3 as much gross income, you will get 1/3 as much R&D. Or perhaps they will cut their advertising budgets to zero, and then you will get 2/3 as much R&D. But still, you will get something.
I don't think of R&D as a budgeting problem; I think of it as an investment problem. After all, even if the pharmaceutical industry has no profits right now, they can borrow the money in the financial markets at fairly attractive rates.
The main obstacle to R&D, then, is not the current state of pharmaceutical industry profits; it is the potential return on the investment in R&D. After all, Merck doesn't have to make drugs; it could generate a nice, safe return of 5% a year in government bonds. Or it could get into some other business, such as making soap. If you drive down the profits on new drugs too far, it stops making sense to invest in new drugs, even if there is a small profit to be made on current production.
Developing new drugs is very, very risky. Depending on what you think constitutes a drug candidate, somewhere between one in one thousand, and one in ten thousand drug candidates makes it from a lab bench to clinical trials. Each of the failed drugs was very expensive, particularly if it got partway through clinicals, which run about $500 million per course.
The problem is, once you've developed a drug, it's easy to copy. It's also usually trivially cheap to produce. And your patent is rapidly running out. This gives a monopsony buyer a lot of leverage to force down your price--you're almost always better off taking something. This is particularly true if the monopsony buyer has the power to break your patent and license its generic manufacturers to turn out cheap but near-perfect imitations of your product2. This is, in fact, what Europe has done; they make pharmaceutical firms sell to them at cost plus. The lion's share of the profits on any drug come from the United States; what they get in Europe and Canada and the rest of the world is (thin) gravy, a price that is just a little bit better than not selling any drugs there.
Now imagine that America drives drug prices down to that sort of "cost+10" or "cost+20" level. The pharmaceutical firms will keep making the drugs they already have, because there will still be a little profit there. But they would have to be psychotic to invest billions of dollars over a 20 year time horizon in exchange for a one in a thousand chance of making that small a profit. Would you put 20% of your income now into an investment that might yield a profit of 10% of your income--in thirty years?
But they have to invest in R&D, say my interlocutors; otherwise they won't have any drugs to sell! This makes the odd assumption that they can't do anything else. But history is full of companies that used to do something else entirely--and also, of companies that went out of business when their market collapsed.
meganmcardle.theatlantic.com
Why can't we just fund R&D from pharmaceutical advertising budgets?
29 Jan 2008 04:28 pm
Even if companies could, they won't, for reasons I just explained. But mostly because pharmaceutical advertising budgets aren't really very big. People who think that there is a gigantic pool of capital that could be sucked out of the pharmaceutical advertising budget are being misled by accounting terminology. People who rail against the pharmaceutical industry are fond of noting that about 20% of industry revenues go to marketing, with the implication that this is all wasted on advertising baldness cures during Golden Girls reruns. But just the top ten firms in the pharmaceutical industry took in about $350 billion in revenue in 2007, 20% of which is $70 billion. The entire US expenditure on advertising by all companies in all media forms totaled something like $150 billion in 2007. I know it seems like every other commercial you see is for Botox, but most advertising is not done by pharmaceutical firms.
In fact, advertising is only a small fraction of that marketing expense. Over half of it expense consists of free samples, the offering of which seems to me like an unalloyed public good.
meganmcardle.theatlantic.com |
