The New York Times‘ Gardiner Harris digs into just what a recently released document (89-page pdf) shows us about how Forest Laboratories successfully marketed Lexapro, a blockbuster drug that wasn’t slowed down by the ready availability of a number of virtually identical generic equivalents.
The 2004 marketing plan focused heavily on marketing directly to doctors and included $34.7 million allocated to paying physicians to deliver 15,000 marketing lectures to their peers in the space of a year, $36 million for providing lunch to doctors in the comfort of their own offices and a strategy for using continuing medical education for marketing purposes.
