Did you know that medicines act as social normalisers, reality enhancers, mood brighteners, personal liberators, caregivers, balance restorers, growth boosters, providers of hope, the quintessential placebos, transformers of self, miracle products, formidable life modifiers, fountains of youth? Understand the deep motives underpinning our buying behaviour relative to medicines to build medicine brands and narratives that engage people at a profoundly human level. This pioneering research cracks the code of buying behaviour related to medicines and puts forward a framework for shaping brand strategy and for growing revenue.

1. BUILDING MEDICINES
BRANDS THROUGH
INTRINSICALLY
ENGAGING
NARRATIVES ™

2. Using a multidisciplinary
approach, BRAND AVIATORS™
has captured and presents, for
the first time, the fundamental
human motives underpinning
our buying behaviour relative
to medicines at the deepest
levels of their deployment …

3. … all the way from:
• their biological value
• to the neurosystems they
engage
• to the cognitive operations and
psychological states they
activate
• to the major social reinforcers
they cause and
• to the rich hierarchy of inherent
concepts they infuse into our
everyday life.

4. This methodology helps
marketers develop
Intrinsically Engaging
Narratives™

5. The motives are
presented in order of
increasing relative
importance in line with
their power to influence
our buying decisions

6. HEDONISM: Why do we buy and
consume so many medicines? On an
initial layer of motivation, what
actually sells medicines is their
cosmetic nature. Pathological implies
passion. We experience medicines
like cosmetics, which make us feel
desirable.

7. Some brands of
medicines embrace us
with understanding and
love and promise to
help us experience the
world with all our
senses.

8. CREATION: More significantly,
we consume medicines because
they promise to help us create
our own life projects. Medicines
give the sense of creating the
self, allowing us to shape our
own characteristics.

9. Our inner story is mostly
shaped when we confront
difficult situations. Chemical
technology can even
reconfigure our brains.

10. Issues of character authenticity, personal
identity and self-creation are at the heart of
both the stories we tell ourselves and others

11. CONNECTEDNESS: On a
deeper layer of motivation,
successful medicines satisfy
our need to feel “normal”,
like everyone else

12. In health we often experience
confusion between the average
human and the biological
human. Since being sick is
undesirable, a homogenisation
of personality lies ahead.
Personality is shaped in line
with the dominant values.

13. Medicines promote other-directed,
social activities. Using them we
literally become socially attractive.
Medicines are, intrinsically,
democratic. In health matters we are
all connected. In all societies and
times rich people have helped the
poor to achieve health. In return,
they receive knowledge of treating
the diseases. The right to health is
our fundamental right.

14. DESTRUCTION: The
knowledge that they are
harmful, makes medicines
more attractive. Their bad
character accentuates their
meanings. To be effective,
drugs must interfere with
functions, inhibit and block
activities, nullify actions,
suppress, eliminate.

15. Like the microbes they kill, medicines can
be invisible, amazing allies but also
insidious invaders. On the one hand
medicines represent care and on the other
addiction. Medicines per se may offer a
good excuse to consume toxic substances
with scientific approval. The everyday
contact with death makes life with death
less unbearable. When we are ill, we feel,
at an unconscious level, that we have
done something wrong.

16. To take a medicine, no matter
which or for what reason, is a
last chance to assert control
over ourselves, to interfere on
our own with our body rather
than let others interfere

17. LIBERATION: On a more profound
layer, medicines are liberating
substances that help us re-establish
autonomy. If not autonomous, life is
not worth living. The logical conclusion
in our mind is that medicines do not
only free us from the illness but also
from the pressures of life.

18. Throughout
history, humans
have used drugs
to escape the
unpleasantness of
reality. Medicines
give a sense of
discovering the
true self.

19. Ultimately, medicines may even
free us from “slavery” to the
genetic endowment bestowed
upon us by nature. Products of
research, medicines are,
themselves, nothing more than
organised experiments of trial
and error. Prescribing
medication is for the physician
also a kind of experiment.

20. CONTROL: A yet more
profound motive
underpinning the
success of medicines, is
that they help us take
control of our body
and, ultimately of
ourselves

21. Disease is essentially a disorder, a
disequilibrating force from outside
our natural ordering. Medicines,
regain order, ensure the normal
functioning of the total system of
body and mind, regulate
chemicals, normalise life.

22. CARE: Another deep
reason we buy medicines
is their essential function of
guarding health, protecting
and alleviating, and in
many cases being real
lifesavers.

23. Medicines give us the
capacity to demonstrate
concern and sympathy. They
enable care to be given.
When we feel we are taken
care of, powerful biological
mechanisms are activated
that allow us to offload our
protective functions like the
feeling of pain to others.

24. BALANCE: Moving a step
closer to the dominant
motives driving the
category, we buy so many
medicines because of their
scientific capacity to
reestablish our lost
equilibrium. In fact,
medicines, by their very
nature, prevent diseases
and restore balance.

25. VITALITY: Proceeding into a deeper
layer of motivation, we consume
medicines because they promise to
help us live a life worth living:
Medicines are “mood brighteners”,
“mood boosters” and “reality
enhancers”.

26. Illness is part of life. If we
are too afraid to live we
lose our life. If we want to
live longer we do not have
to live less fully.

27. Medicines help us increase our
capacity to play, cheer us up. In
using them we experience the
present, we become newly
attuned to the richness of each
moment of life. One can achieve
happiness by letting go, by taking
life as it comes, becoming less
serious.

28. EMPOWERMENT: The efficient,
potent and active agents
promise to boost decisiveness,
to increase our capacity for
emotional growth and to make
us face reality with energy,
self-confidence and focus, and
even to enhance our capacities
and characteristics. Medicines
are growth enhancers.

29. Not content with the normal
human body and the need to
restore it in case of a disease, we
seek to increase its potentialities.
For humans, health is a feeling of
assurance in life to which no limit
is fixed. As there is no upper limit
to normal, medicines help us
nourish the illusion that we can be
indestructible, invincible.

30. SECURITY: On an even deeper
level, through medicines we buy
hope that recovery is just around
the corner. Anything that provides
ground for hope is capable of
encouraging the immune system to
be more liberal with its precious
resources. To succeed and grow
we must be happy. Placebo exists
in all societies and cultures. It is a
symbol by which faith is sustained.

31. Like children, we seek
immediate comfort, we
cannot wait a moment,
even though ultimately
the uncomfortable
symptoms are created
by the body to expel
some threat.

32. Medicines were used
through history as candies
- a permissible form of
consuming sweetness

33. TRANSFORMATION: On the
innermost layer of human
motivation, we consider
medicines wonder products,
agents of change,
formidable transformers.
Intrinsically, health is a
process of adaptation to
new norms of life.

34. Medicines are magic molecules
which change the substance of
the ailing body. Contradictive
and ambivalent, medicines are
catalysts and executors of
mutations. When the change
comes it is remarkable. The
person can move from one
state to another, change
personalities, adopt any role.

35. Medicines are goods whose
meaning is versatile and
easy to change to
accommodate the user’s
particular wants, wishes,
expectations and hopes.

36. Medicines modify, mimic, alter
perceptions, activate receptors,
counter the effects of hormones and
transmitters, inhibit enzyme
activity, catalyze, promote chemical
changes, modify inborn
predispositions, fragment reality,
distort cognition, transform the self,
raise the dead.

37. They do not only act on a
physical level but they also
create satisfaction, repair
intimate relationships,
change moods, transform
lives.

38. Agents that modulate lifestyles
rather than cure diseases, some
drugs mask reality to make it
more palatable

39. Like all magical things the
dosage of medicine is a ritual –
to be repeated daily, at the
same times. The impression of
magic is intensified by
medicines’ small size and the
significant changes they
produce in the body, mind or
both. Moreover, medicines can
be used privately and secretly.
We expect from high-science
technology, which has replaced
magic, results here and now, to
feel better from the first dose.

40. Magic blue pills, and fountains of
youth, do not just instantly heal
and relieve or make sex happen,
but reconstruct the individual

41. Before science entered medicine,
the secrets of health were
withheld by older people, sages
and shamans

42. We still believe in magic cures, except
now they have transformed
themselves into scientific formulas,
concocted in mysterious laboratories
using chemical and test tube witchcraft
to come up with elixirs of youth

43. Paradoxically, the more we
master science, the larger the
role played by mystery in the
healing process becomes

44. This map illustrates
the way some
major brands in
the global
pharmaceutical
industry are
positioned in the
consumers’ mind

45. Successful brands
coherently express
the fundamental
human motives
driving their
category

46. BRAND AVIATORS™ specialises in
activating the unique codes of your
brand, those that engage people at a
profound human level using a three-
phase methodology

47. Phase 1: Map the territory
The first phase of the
methodology deconstructs the
fundamental human
motives driving the sales and
profit of the category,
establishes the relevant
psychographic territories and
reveals the way that the
brands are mapped in
people’s mind

48. Phase 2: Give soul to your
brand
To be authentic and engaging,
narratives must always be
sourced from the core of the
brand. The second phase
captures the core of the brand,
and mobilises its genuine codes
in order to satisfy our common
motivations relative to the
category.

49. Phase 3: Enrich people’s lives
Powerful strategies require
effective articulation. In this third
phase, the consumer proposition is
translated into ownable
experiences written in the
language that uses our primary
emotions as structural elements.

50. Engage BRAND AVIATORS™ to
help you:
1. build brands on human
fundamentals
2. align all brand
communications under a
master idea that works
across different cultures
3. develop Intrinsically
Engaging Narratives™

51. BRAND AVIATORS™ is trusted by some of the world’s
leading companies:

52. To receive in-depth analyses of the
motives underpinning buying
behaviour relative to specific
categories of goods, click the button:
FREE
REPORTS