Best Marketing Tagline of All Time?

Search “the best tagline of all time” and you’ll find hundreds of well-crafted marketing messages.

Amazingly, the most effective tagline of all time isn’t even mentioned on any of these lists, but we hear it every day. The best tagline of all time is:

“Ask your doctor if this medication is right for you.”

This doesn’t just sell a product; it fundamentally changes the doctor/patient relationship.

The tagline single-handedly reframes a patient’s approach to a medical problem from, “What should I do?” to “Is this the right drug for me?”
It creates a therapeutic expectation in which patients only feel cared for when a doctor writes a prescription, and
Since only expensive medications are advertised, costly drugs rather than the most effective meds become the top-of-mind priority¹.

Over the last several years I have asked numerous people if they knew a more effective tagline. No one has yet challenged the number one position of, “Ask your doctor…”.

After advertising regulations were reduced in the early 1990’s the annual direct to consumer (DTC) advertising costs escalated from $166 million in 1993 to $5.4 billion in 2006².

With this rapid rise in DTC ads, doctors became frustrated by how much the advertising infringed on their relationships with patients. Five years after DTC was legalized, I engaged a marketing firm to design a focus group to learn how physician attitudes had changed with the aggressive advertising to their patients.

To say the least, our findings were startling. Physicians were still unhappy with the ads, but had come to the conclusion that fighting them was impossible. Instead, they changed their mindset to consider the ads as free marketing – a way to bring more patients to their offices. They also explained that the ads generated so much patient expectation that not writing a prescription often resulted in an angry patient. Therefore, rather than buck the system, they just wrote more prescriptions and sent their patients quickly and happily on their way.

One way or another, nearly everybody pays for the reduced quality of care this “innocuous” tagline causes.

A recent study³ demonstrated the subtle changes that result from “Ask Your Doctor…”.

The study showed that if a specific drug was requested by a patient from an ad they saw, the doctor was twice as likely to prescribe it, even if it cost several times more than an equally effective drug.

Even more concerning, if the requested drug is generally considered inappropriate (i.e. a narcotic for chronic non-cancer pain), doctors were twenty times as likely to prescribe the drug than if it had not been specifically requested.

What has happened to drug sales since the increase in DTC advertising? Prescription costs rose from $40 billion in 1990 to $298 billion in 2014⁴. This increase is not all from direct to consumer advertising, but it has laid the foundation for systematic overprescribing of expensive medications.

This Conversation has touched on only one of multiple factors reducing healthcare effectiveness. If you work for a self-insured employer that could use some help fighting the costs and ineffectiveness of the healthcare system – check into what Switch has to offer .

Breakthrough To Better,
Carl