InVentiv Communications

inVentiv/inChord Communications is a public relations/marketing company that focuses on the pharmaceutical industry. From its website:

inVentiv Communications assists pharmaceutical and biotech companies with a comprehensive portfolio of marketing services through inChord Communications Inc., one of the largest global healthcare communications companies in the world.[1]

Principals

• Blane Walter President, inVentiv Communications, CEO, inChord Communications
• Joe Daley President, Columbus Operations, GSW Worldwide
• Phil Deschamps President and CEO GSW Worldwide
• Garnett Dezember President The Navicor Group
• Jack Dupps SVP, Human Resources inChord Communications
• Kelly Gratz President Blue Diesel
• Guy Mastrion Chief Global Creative Officer Palio Communications
• Ed Mitzen CEO Palio Communications
• Mike Myers President Palio Communications
• William O'Donnell Chief Administrative Officer/CFO inChord Communications
• Vince Parry Chief Branding Officer President, New York Operations inChord Communications

Campaigns

Selling diseases to healthy people, and Branding diseases

Le Monde Diplomatique, May 2006 ^[2], reports:

Vince Parry is the cutting edge of that global marketing. An expert in advertising who works from his mid-town Manhattan office in New York, Parry specialises in the most sophisticated form of medicine salesmanship: he works with drug companies to help create new diseases.
In an astonishing publication, The Art of Branding a Condition, he recently revealed the ways in which companies are involved in fostering the creation of medical disorders (1). Sometimes a little-known condition gets fresh attention, sometimes an old disease is redefined and renamed, and sometimes a whole new dysfunction is created. Parry’s personal favourites include erectile dysfunction, adult attention deficit disorder, and pre-menstrual dysphoric disorder (which is so controversial a classification that some researchers say it doesn’t exist).
Branding disease
With rare candour Parry explains how pharmaceutical companies take the lead, not just in branding such blockbuster drugs as Prozac and Viagra, but in branding the very conditions that create the markets for those drugs. Under the leadership of the drug marketers, Madison Avenue experts such as Parry collude with medical experts to “create new ideas about illnesses and conditions”. The goal, Parry says, is to give drug company customers around the world “a new way to think about things”. The aim is to make a direct link between the condition and the company’s medicine, to maximise its sales.

External Resources

• ^Alan Cassels and Ray Moynihan, US: selling to the worried well:Pharmaceuticals for healthy people, Le monde diplomatique, May 2006. (LMD synopsis: US pharmaceutical companies have long known that the potential market for their products is limited by the finite number of sick people; so they have turned to the healthy for further expansion of their markets, using exploitative, fear-inducing advertising techniques.)

Contact

• Website: www.inventivhealth.com