Too Much Drug Advertising? A Qualitative Perspective Of Romanian Pharmaceutical Market

Nowadays, education and health represent key sectors for social and economic progress. Due to the technological and scientific development, drug producers have developed many products. Because of the high demand of pharmaceutical products, more and more companies appeared, therefore the competition raised. All these lead to the need of promoting pharmaceutical companies and products. Although money spent in research and delevolpment (R&D) increased lately (FiercePharma, 2017), pharmaceutical companies nowadays invest huge amount of money in promotional activities, even double compared to the money invested in R&D activities (Olson, 2015). This paper aims to analyze how promotional activities of pharmaceuticals are perceived by the Romanian consumer, using focus-group research technique in order to obtain valuable information. The findings show that there are many people who are complaining about the excess of promotional activities, especially on the T.V. and also, they feel offended because of the content and the childish presentation form of the commercials. All this information may lead to a supersaturation of promotional activities which may decrease sales of the brands who have the most aggressive promotional strategy. Other important findings refer to ethical issues in pharmaceutical industry especially in client-pharmacist relationship which is vital but also criticized.