Physician Response to Contextualized Price-Comparison Claims in Prescription Drug Advertising.
BACKGROUND: Physician-targeted prescription drug advertisements sometimes include price comparisons between products that may misleadingly imply equivalence of efficacy and safety or misrepresent true savings, suggesting the potential utility of a context statement to explain what the claims do and do not mean. METHODS: We manipulated the presence of a price claim and a context statement in a 1 × 3 (control condition, price-comparison-only, price-comparison-plus-context) between-subjects design. Physicians (N = 1,438), randomly assigned to condition, viewed the prescription drug ad and answered a brief survey. Primary outcome measures included recognition, perceived importance, and impact of the price-comparison claim, and recognition, understanding, and effectiveness of the context statement. RESULTS: The majority of physicians accurately recognized the price claim (76.0%) but far fewer accurately recognized the associated context statement (44.9%). The context statement did not affect evaluations of the price-comparison claim importance or accuracy and did not have the intended effects on perceptions of uncertainty about drug interchangeability. Physicians may be affected by price-comparison claims in thinking that the drug has risks that are relatively less severe. Price-comparison claims also affected intentions to look for information about the drug. CONCLUSIONS: Adding a realistic context statement to a physician-targeted prescription drug ad did not generate sufficient awareness of claim caveats to differentiate price-comparison response of those exposed to the context statement from those who were not.
Duke Scholars
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- 4206 Public health
- 4203 Health services and systems
- 2001 Communication and Media Studies
- 1117 Public Health and Health Services
- 1110 Nursing
Citation
Published In
DOI
EISSN
Publication Date
Volume
Issue
Start / End Page
Location
Related Subject Headings
- 4206 Public health
- 4203 Health services and systems
- 2001 Communication and Media Studies
- 1117 Public Health and Health Services
- 1110 Nursing