New Media Engines of Global Pharmaceuticalization: An Analysis of Top-Grossing Pharmaceutical Corporations

Abstract

This dissertation provides the most holistic examination to date of pharmaceutical corporate social media marketing communications, domestically, globally, and cross-nationally. Pharmaceutical corporations are heavily invested in their marketing practices, spending more annually on advertising than research and development. Yet pharmaceutical corporations have been limited in their direct contact with consumers, with the most effective form of marketing, Direct-to-Consumer Advertising (DTCA), prohibited in all by two countries (U.S. and New Zealand). Enter: social media, a new space to communicate directly with patient-consumers across the world. This dissertation establishes pharmaceutical corporate social media marketing strategies as key mechanisms of pharmaceuticalization. Using 6 datasets that collectively contain over 100,000 tweets and replies posted between 2010 and 2019 by pharmaceutical corporations, this research combines traditional qualitative content analysis and latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic models to examine U.S., global, and emerging market pharmaceutical corporate social media marketing strategies. This research adds to understandings of pharmaceuticalization by elucidating interconnected processes that occur at multiple levels on Twitter. Pharmaceutical corporations establish brand personalities and trust by adjusting well-established DTCA tactics to fit the format of tweets. This is reinforced with Direct-to-Consumer Interaction (DTCI), the formal and informal interactions with patient-consumers that take shape in reply posts. Through mediated interaction, corporations become both casual acquaintance and medical expert engaging in dialog on a wide range of topics and encouraging patient-consumers to further explore corporate sponsored websites and support groups. Taken together, findings demonstrate how social media acts as a space where pharmaceutical corporations can promote the normalization of pharmacological interventions on a global scale, while remaining in the legal realm of “not advertising.”