Natesto®. What Else? New Trends in Drug Naming

Abstract

This paper is a lexicological study of the brand names of newly FDA (Food and Drug Administration) approved drugs which aims at highlighting the new trends observed in drug naming. For our corpus, we used a listing of 320 drugs approved by the FDA for sale in the United States for the years 2012 to 2017. In our study, we showed that the commonly used letters X and Z were giving way to A and O endings so as to attract Romance languages speaking clients. We demonstrated that this trend matched a less recent ploy in food and automotive marketing. We focused on the “Vowel/Consonant+lexeme” matrix that is found almost exclusively in the drug industry because it permits to create a name shorter in writing – an advantage for prescribers. Although the FDA recommended that “unsubstantial beneficial” connotations be banned, we uncovered the presence of promotional affixes as well as hidden emotional contents that are meant to be persuasive.

Pazarlamada Ses Semboli̇zmi̇: Ses Semboli̇zmi̇ni̇ Araştiran Pazarlama Çalişmalarinin Üzeri̇ne Bütüncül Bi̇r İnceleme

“…Nevertheless, sound symbolism concept has dated back a long time and so it has also been the object of interest of many scholars from different disciplines such as linguistics (e.g., Newman, 1933;Sapir, 1929); psycholinguistics (e.g., Asano et al, 2015;Maurer et el., 2006;Ramachandran and Hubbard, 2001); psychology (e.g., Crisnel and Spence, 2009;Ngo et al, 2013), anthropology (Nuckolls, 1999); literature (Collins, 1977;Finke, 1995;Ross, 2009); biology (e.g., Morton, 1977;Ohala, 1994); medicine (e.g., Abel and Glinert, 2008;Faure, 2018) and so on. For that reason, it is particularly important to conduct a review study regarding sound symbolism in marketing context towards a better understanding of the effects of sound symbolism in marketing and particularly brand naming context.…”

Good vs. Bad: An Empirical Analysis of the Brand Names of Coronavirus Vaccines

“…These regulations are complex and may vary from market to market. One context is, however, obvious: drug names should not be similar to other drug names or to drug names with other active ingredients, and they should not include inactive ingredients in the name (Faure, 2018). The reason is, that similar drug names may confuse consumers -or even physicians -which can result in medication errors (see Aronson, 2004;Lambert et al, 2005).…”

“…The reason is, that similar drug names may confuse consumers -or even physicians -which can result in medication errors (see Aronson, 2004;Lambert et al, 2005). For the same reason, misleading names or name elements connected to general drugs should also be avoided (Faure, 2018).…”

“…All these aspects increase the costs of the development of a brand name. Naming drugs can cost companies several hundred thousand dollars (see Collier, 2014;Faure, 2018), and pharmaceutical brands are presumably the most research-and resource-intensive brand names to develop (Bugdahl, 2005). When naming a drug, not only is the name created and coined, but brand benefits and brand language are developed parallel with the product to achieve longevity (Cooper, 2001;Robins, 2001), adding to the costs of naming.…”