AZ faces fight over cholesterol-buster

ANGLO-Swedish giant AstraZeneca is going head-to-head with American pharmaceuticals rival Pfizer for a slice of the biggest drugs sector on earth - the market for cholesterol lowering medicine.

AstraZeneca's Crestor arrives on store shelves to stand next to Lipitor, the world's biggest-selling drug, which raked in $8.6bn (£5.4bn) in revenues for Pfizer last year.

To make any dent in Lipitor's presence, AstraZeneca will have to pull out all the stops in its marketing, particularly because three other cholesterol drugs are available backed by pharmaceutical giants Merck, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Schering-Plough.

The company, headed by Sir Tom McKillop, will not say exactly how it is going to market Crestor, or what it will cost. 'We don't want to give anything away to the competition,' said AstraZeneca spokesman Gary Bruell. However, the initial marketing budget is thought to be in the region of $40m to $60m.

To start with, the company will use its sales force to woo the medical profession - always the first line of attack. The second, probably to be launched in the winter, will be direct-to-consumer advertising in America. Unlike Europe, the US allows drugs to be advertised on TV and in print and the industry sees this as essential for branding a medicine. AstraZeneca's task is daunting - last year its rivals spent a total of $207m on advertising their anti-cholesterol drugs.

Although AstraZeneca claims Crestor is more effective than Lipitor, Pfizer will almost certainly counter-attack by emphasising Lipitor's long track record and proven safety. Some tests suggest Crestor may be marginally less safe.

Direct advertising, once something of an afterthought, is now regarded as essential. It fixes the name of the drug in the public's mind, and leads to patients asking for or demanding prescriptions from doctors.

This can generate an explosion in sales of the medicine, as the marketing of Viagra proved a few years ago.

The looming advertising battle between AstraZeneca and Pfizer thus has all the making of a classic marketing confrontation between leaders in an industry that increasingly relies on advertising. According to a study by Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the pharmaceuticals industry spent $2.7bn on advertising prescription drugs to consumers in 2001.

A few big-selling drugs tend to grab the lion's share of the marketing budget: treatments for heartburn, allergies, depression and cholesterol.

Pfizer spent $90m advertising Viagra, now one of the best-known brand names in the world.

According to Rx Insight, a consulting firm that advises drug companies, the industry spends more on advertising than on research and development. Critics point out that one of the reasons the companies advertise so much is that so many of their drugs are virtually imitations of each other. It takes a major marketing campaign to give each one a distinct identity in the public mind.

Crestor is a typical example. It is not substantially different from Lipitor and does the same job. To make it stand out, an expensive marketing campaign will be mandatory.