Business - Ethical Medicine Ethical

Business - Ethical Medicine ETHICAL ISSUES in PHARMACEUTICAL ADVERTISING Public Relations in Corporate Branding: In the last half of the 20th century, commercial advertising made the transition from one dimensional advertising to comprehensive corporate branding comprising advertising functions as part of a fully integrated effort (Belch & Belch 1998). The integration of computerized internal communications in the 1990s and shortly thereafter, widespread Internet connectivity, both facilitated the complete internalization of corporate public relations functions.

The full spectrum of public relations functions is crucially important in corporate branding, and its internalization enabled more efficient message standardization in addition to substantially reducing fixed costs. Integrated corporate branding through multiple media is far more effective than isolated media advertising, having been demonstrated as early as the 1960s by Coca Cola and Pepsi, in particular (Ogilvy 1983). Traditionally, essential public relations functions such as corporate communications, media advertising, and marketing campaigns were outsourced to publicity and advertising specialist with no other relation to corporate clients apart from their accounts.

Corporate giants such as those that dominated the tobacco, food, and automotive industries had already internalized public relations to a large degree several decades earlier, but before computers became ubiquitous in the workplace, doing so was cost prohibitive for all but the corporate giants (Belch & Belch). By the turn of the 21st century, most large and medium-sized business entities had already completed the transition to fully-integrated public relations functions.

Ethical Issues in Healthcare Product Initiatives: Public relations initiatives in conjunction with healthcare-related product industries must pay closer attention to ethical distinctions than many non-healthcare- related industries. Precisely because of the effectiveness of well designed public relations initiatives, it is unethical to fail to disclose certain classes of information and particular relationships between corporate sponsors and their messages. In medicine, for one example, pharmaceutical companies have established something of a tradition compensating physicians for their time in connection with contributing to educational seminars on topics within their professional expertise (Kolata 2008).

This alone does not necessarily raise ethical issues, except that most of these initiatives include the presentations that lend themselves very naturally to creating impressions favorable to certain specific treatment choices over others. Where physician speakers are rewarded financially for their talks, ethical issues arise over the line between education and advertising. The issue is particularly relevant in conjunction with medical research presentations without full disclosure of the degree to which the speaker is affiliated with or compensated directly by the sponsor.

In some cases, physicians have begun declining the opportunities to participate in such capacity, after discovering that.