Branding Report: GSK Pharmaceuticals' Brand Reflects Target Audience

This report provides an in-depth analysis of GSK Pharmaceuticals' branding strategy, focusing on how the company's brand image reflects its target audience and differentiates itself from competitors. The report examines the role of branding in creating awareness and influencing consumer perceptions, particularly in the pharmaceutical industry. It explores how GSK Pharmaceuticals, a leading healthcare firm, utilizes its brand to establish trust and reliability, especially with products like Panadol. The analysis covers the extent to which the brand reflects the target audience's personality, highlighting how consumers associate Panadol with fast pain relief and self-medication. Furthermore, the report investigates how GSK Pharmaceuticals uses its brand, packaging, and marketing strategies, including digital communication, to stand out in a competitive market and maintain a significant market share. The conclusion summarizes the importance of branding in enhancing sales and profitability through effective communication and brand differentiation.

Branding

TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................1
B. Extent to which the organization's brand reflects their target audience's personality.......1
C. How organization uses their brand to help differentiate themselves from competition....2
CONCLUSION................................................................................................................................4
REFERENCES................................................................................................................................5

INTRODUCTION
The purpose of the research is to assess the meaning of branding as it results from a set of
associations and perceptions in the individual's mind. Branding helps people to influence and
generate awareness regarding the popularity of business in the market. For instance, any business
enterprise can benefit themselves through creating a brand name that represents them as
distinctive, trusted and reliable among other competitors (Katchanov and et.al., 2014). In recent
time, branding has been changed for businesses because of introduction of digital
communication through which target audience can be easily communicated and thus it helps in
creating a brand image in the market. In the current study, organization undertaken is
GlaxoSmithKline Pharmaceuticals Ltd which is one of the best pharmaceutical and health care
firms. However, company offers a range of medicines and vaccines for the prevention of
numerous diseases.
B. Extent to which the organization's brand reflects their target audience's personality
It can be assessed that GSK Pharmaceuticals brand reflects their image in the form of
quality medicines produced by them. It helps them to develop a qualitative brand image in the
market among other available competitors so that their target audience personality can be
reflected. However, it shows that individual who do not believe to go to doctors for headache,
body pain etc. Thus, they undertake Panadol drug which is manufactured by GSK
Pharmaceuticals and thus creates a brand image for fast action among consumers. By taking such
type of medicine patient feels relief and thus it reflects brand image of firm in the market. People
generally refer to the product Panadol because they have trust in the company and they are able
to get pain relief from its medicines (Wheeler, 2012). Organization understands the pain of
people and thus they influence their workers to develop such tablets that provide fast relief to
users. It helps in building distinctive brand image in the market. Panadol contains paracetamol
and thus it helps in providing instant pain relief to the individuals. Therefore, users trust the
medicine and consumes it whenever they have any type of pain such as general pain, muscle and
joint, cold and flu etc. However, it is essential for users to use it effectively as prescribed by
doctors because it also contains caffeine (Sun, 2003).
It can be evaluated that any individual taking Panadol medicine reflects their personality
that they want instant relief from any type of pain. Also, they do not prefer to visit doctors or
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physicians for such small pain and believe that by taking Panadol pain will be overcome easily .
However, Panadol does its work and provides instant pain relief to person because it includes
paracetamol content that minimize the effect of pain within hours. It is all because it affects
directly on one of the nerve of brain and thus makes people comfortable. Hence, people using
Panadol as a brand medicine reflect their personality as drug addict and do not prefer to go to
doctors for the such small pain (Kavaratzis and Hatch, 2013). Simply, they go to pharmacist and
purchase the drug as it directly provides relief to the patients and make them feel better. Brands
like Panadol and Nurofen are able to convince clients that pay instant relief to patient's pain. It
helps firm to create a distinct brand image in the market. For instance, if pain strikes in any
individual then people reach for the branded pain relief such as Panadol instead of cheaper
generic medicines available in the market. It is all because of high brand image of Panadol in the
market which reflects that it is a safe and effective pain killer.
It can be easily assessed the difference between the branded and generic medicine.
However, generic medicine also includes similar content and there is no different in quality but
because of no brand name it is not purchased by consumers. While, if the same medicine is sold
with a brand name then its price will be become just double (Furnham and Goh, 2014). Also, it is
the mentality of users that if medicine is costly then it will react fast but they do not know that it
contains similar salt content and thus takes minimum time to react on their body and kills the
pain. As per Euromonitor Data, it has been stated that Australians spend around $629m on pain
killers among which half of the sales has been accounted of Panadol and Nuroten (Brown and
Campelo, 2014). Panadol contains around 28% of market share it is all because of its distinctive
brand image in the market . Hence, it can be stated that brand image of Panadol reflects its target
audience personality as brand followers. Thus, people prefer to consume the medicine directly as
they believe that it will kill their pain and provide them instant relief.
C. How organization uses their brand to help differentiate themselves from competition
By considering the official website of company, it can be assessed that GSK
Pharmaceuticals uses their brand name in order to differentiate Panadol from varied other
competitors. Business uses the tag line fast pain relief that attracts consumers to purchase the
tablet whenever they are strike from any type of pain. Another crucial factor in differentiating
themselves from competition is packaging. For instance, packaging of Panadol Osteo and
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Panadol Back & Neck Long Lasting both contains 665mg of paracetamol and are marketed by
firm under the brand image of “sustained release” tablets. However, these tablets provide pain
relief for up to eight hours. Thus, GSK admits that firm is using effective brand image in the
market so that clients can be attracted. Business uses their brand image as targeted pain relief and
develop distinctive brand image in the market from its competitors (Abratt and Kleyn, 2012). It
is a fast acting pain relief that target all consumers in order to provide them the best relief from
different types of pain such as cold and flu, body pain and muscle pain etc. Moreover, it can be
assessed that both Panadol Osteo and Panadol Back and Neck Long Lasting contains similar
665mg of paracetamol but they are differentiated in its packaging as well price tags.
GSK Pharmaceuticals is focused on enhancing its brand image through targeting people
who are regularly using the pain relief tablets and not prescribing doctors. Therefore, business
provides Panadol with Paracetamol content that provides fast pain relief to patients so that they
always prefer to purchase their product and thus it increases sales and profitability of firm in the
market. Organization targets those people who are regularly buying Panadol tablet so that sales
can be enhanced. However, in order to popularize the brand name, firm is focused on promoting
its tablets through digital communication such as internet, websites and social networking sites.
Company provides the detailed information regarding the content and use of tablet on its
packaging so that people can be clarified that through using such medicine they will get relief
from pain (Chabowski, Samiee and Hult, 2013). It is a type of pain killer and gives tough
competition to its rivals such as Nurofen. Panadol's obtains 28% market share due to high brand
image in the market as compared to Nurofen i.e. which obtains around 22%. Panadol uses their
brand image which is distinctive in the market and thus attracts people to use the medicine as
instant pain relief and providing them assistance by reducing their pain within 8 hours.
GSK is a one of the branded drug companies and thus it provides branded medicines to
its client base rather than providing them generic medicines. However, generic medicines are
cheaper as compared to branded ones. Thus, Panadol uses its brand name in order to differentiate
itself from other competitors. Also, business uses effective packaging that help in differentiating
it and attaining high market share. Company's innovative and new product line up provide its
competitive edge over other rivals. In order to differentiate itself from competitors, business is
focusing on its development and also enabling firm to develop nest generation of patent
protected drugs in order to evergreen it's pricing strategy (Taneja, 2013). Furthermore, business
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also possess an effective and powerful distribution channel that attracts varied biotech companies
in order to market the drugs. Thus, all such advantages provide benefit to consumers in the form
of relieving pain timely. However, it benefits firm to gain competitive advantage from other
competitors and creates distinctive brand image in the market. GSK improves its research and
development department in order to produce effective medicines so that it can cure people fast.
Panadol creates a distinctive brand image in the market as compared to other pain killers.
Therefore, people usually purchase the drug at the time of any type of pain i.e. cold and flu, body
pain and muscle pain etc. Thus, people often purchase Panadol drug whenever such type of pain
occurs which improves the brand popularity of firm in the market (OlajideTalabi and Abubakri,
2012).
CONCLUSION
From the above study it can be conferred that branding assists in influencing and
attracting consumers and also helps in enhancing the sales and profitability of firm in the market.
Thus, GSK Pharmaceuticals promotes its branded drugs in the market through adopting effective
digital communication method so that best results can be attained. Company's product Panadol
helps in creating a distinct brand image among targeted audience in the name of instant pain
relief. Therefore, people instead of visiting to doctor for general headache or body pain consume
the tablet and found themselves better. At the end, firm is also able to develop distinctive brand
popularity in the market as compared to competitors through attractive packaging and
redesigning its tablet.
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REFERENCES
Books and Journals
Abratt, R. and Kleyn, N., 2012. Corporate identity, corporate branding and corporate reputations:
Reconciliation and integration. European Journal of Marketing. 46(7/8). pp. 1048-1063.
Brown, S. and Campelo, A., 2014. Do cities have broad shoulders? Does Motown need a
haircut? On urban branding and the personification of place. Journal of Macromarketing.
34(4). pp. 421-434.
Chabowski, B. R., Samiee, S. and Hult, G. T. M., 2013. A bibliometric analysis of the global
branding literature and a research agenda. Journal of International Business Studies.
44(6). pp. 622-634.
Furnham, A. and Goh, M. F., 2014. Effects of program‐advertisement congruity and
advertisement emotional appeal on memory for health and safety advertisements. Journal
of Applied Social Psychology. 44(1). pp. 60-70.
Katchanov, J. and et, al., 2014. HIV-associated multicentric Castleman’s disease after initiation
of antiretroviral therapy: experience of a European centre. Infection. 42(4). pp. 791-793.
Kavaratzis, M. and Hatch, M. J., 2013. The dynamics of place brands an identity-based approach
to place branding theory. Marketing Theory. 13(1). pp. 69-86.
OlajideTalabi, F. and Abubakri, O. R., 2012. Making Slogans and Unique Selling Propositions
(USP) Beneficial to Advertisers and the Consumers. New Media and Mass
Communication. 3. pp. 30-35.
Taneja, Y., 2013. Impact of packaging appearance of pharmaceutical products on customers.
ACADEMICIA: An International Multidisciplinary Research Journal. 3(4). pp. 227-243.
Wheeler, A., 2012. Designing brand identity: an essential guide for the whole branding team.
John Wiley & Sons.
Online
Sun, B., 2003. Measuing the Impact of Promotions on Brand Switching When Consumers Are
Forward Looking. [PDF]. Available through:
<http://english.ckgsb.edu.cn/sites/default/files/ck_faculty_bhsun_stockpiling.pdf>.
[Accessed on 10th November 2015].
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