Direct to consumer advertising of prescription medicines in New Zealand to retain market share

Abstract

Direct to consumer advertising (DTCA) of prescription medicine is only practised in New Zealand and USA. This study attempted to find a link between the rate of advertising and the rate of dispensing, and subsequently explored the timing of advertising relative to the arrival of generic equivalents to the advertised brand. Nine magazine titles were exhaustively hand searched from January 2005 to December 2009 for advertisements for prescription medicines. For a subset of advertised medicines, subsidised dispensing rates of those medicines and equivalent products were obtained from the New Zealand Ministry of Health/PHARMAC for the same period. The rates of advertising were then compared with the rates of dispensing. No direct link was observed between the rate of advertising and the rate of dispensing of that particular medicine. However, almost all advertising occurred around the introduction of subsidy for competitor products. This suggests that medicine advertising is intended to act defensively, to preserve market share. This type of medicine advertising has not been observed previously, and does not offer any clear educational benefit to the consumer, and instead may lead to out of pocket spending where a cheaper equivalent medicine is available.