We do not just buy medicines. By integrating intrinsic functionality with predefined meaning we create and express the master narratives of our lives.

We derive the maximum value from narratives that are automatically

identifiable and viscerally classifiable as evolving parts of our human

experience

What deeply engages us always fulfils some fundamental motive, the evolutionarily-preserved dispositions that have helped us survive and grow

Concepts are neural structures that allow us to order and categoriseall stimuli around us

Our psyche consists of a code. We are an ordered pattern of fundamental motives capable of generating life.

Successful brands coherently express the very patterns of our psyche

Using , for the first time, a

multidisciplinary approach, including

brand communication decoding,

motivational research, psychology,

affective neuroscience, cognitive

linguistics, cultural anthropology,

sociology, philosophy and their

proprietary tools, BRAND AVIATORS™

has studied the motives underpinning

buying behaviour in over 70 global

categories of goods including

medicines

Beneath all the phantasmagoria of

global marketing communication,

lies order and rhythm, the source

code of our human behaviour

What follows is a brief analysis of the deep motives for buying medicines. The motives are presented in order of increasing relative importance in line with their power to influence our buying decisions. The further we read, the stronger the associations they build in our mind, the more powerful their influence on the sales and profit in the medicines category.

* A book will shortly be published, extensively

analysing the motives underpinning 33 categories of

everyday consumer goods and our fundamental human motives. It puts forward the most integrated platform for engaging people to date.

HEDONISM: Why do we buy and consume so many medicines? On an initial layer of motivation, what actually sells medicines is their cosmetic nature. Pathological implies passion. We experience medicines like cosmetics, which make us feel desirable. Some brands of medicines embrace us with understanding and love and promise to help us experience the world with all our senses.

CREATION: More significantly, we

consume medicines because they

promise to help us create our own life

projects. Medicines give the sense of

creating the self, allowing us to shape

our own characteristics. Our inner story is

mostly shaped when we confront difficult

situations. Chemical technology can even

reconfigure our brains. Issues of

character authenticity, personal identity

and self-creation are at the heart of both

the stories we tell ourselves and others

and modern pharmacology.

CONNECTEDNESS: On a deeper layer of

motivation, successful medicines satisfy

our need to feel “normal”, like everyone

else. In health we often experience

confusion between the average human

and the biological human. It follows that

personality is shaped in line with the

dominant values. Since being sick is

undesirable, a homogenisation of

personality lies ahead.

Medicines promote other-directed,

social activities. Using them we

literally become socially attractive.

Medicines are, intrinsically,

democratic. In health matters we are

all connected. In all societies and

times rich people have helped the

poor to achieve health. In return,

they receive knowledge of treating

the diseases. The right to health is

our fundamental right.

DESTRUCTION: The knowledge that they are harmful,

makes medicines more attractive. Their bad character

accentuates their meanings. To be effective, drugs must

interfere with functions, inhibit and block activities,

nullify actions, suppress, eliminate. Like the microbes

they kill, they can be invisible, amazing allies but also

insidious invaders. On the one hand medicines represent

care and on the other addiction. Medicines per se may

offer a good excuse to consume toxic substances with

scientific approval. Essentially, the everyday contact

with death makes life with death less unbearable. When

we are ill, we feel, at an unconscious level, that we have

done something wrong. To take a medicine, no matter

which or for what reason, is a last chance to assert

control over ourselves, to interfere on our own with our

body rather than let others interfere.

LIBERATION: On a more profound layer, medicines are

liberating substances that help us re-establish

autonomy. If not autonomous, life is not worth living.

The logical conclusion in our mind is that medicines do

not only free us from the illness but also from the

pressures of life. Throughout history, humans have

used drugs to escape the unpleasantness of reality.

Medicines give a sense of discovering the true self.

Ultimately, medicines may even free us from “slavery”

to the genetic endowment bestowed upon us by

nature. Products of research, medicines are,

themselves, nothing more than organised experiments

of trial and error. Prescribing medication is for the

physician a kind of experiment.

CONTROL: A yet more profound

motive underpinning the success of

medicines, is that they help us take

control of our body and, ultimately of

ourselves. Disease is essentially a

disorder, a disequilibrating force from

outside our natural ordering.

Medicines, regain order, ensure the

normal functioning of the total system

of body and mind, regulate chemicals,

normalize life.

CARE: Another deep reason we buy

medicines is based on their essential function

of guarding health, protecting and

alleviating, and in many cases being real

lifesavers. It follows that medicines give us

the capacity to demonstrate concern and

sympathy. They enable care to be given.

When we feel we are taken care of,

powerful biological mechanisms are

activated that allow us to offload our

protective functions like the feeling of pain

to others.

BALANCE: Moving a step

closer to the dominant

motives driving the

category, we buy so many

medicines because of their

scientific capacity to

reestablish our lost

equilibrium. In fact,

medicines, by their very

nature, prevent diseases

and restore balance.

VITALITY: Proceeding into a deeper layer of

motivation, we consume medicines because they

promise to help us live a life worth living:

Medicines are “mood brighteners”, “mood

boosters” and “reality enhancers”. In essence,

illness is part of life. If we are too afraid to live

we lose our life. If we want to live longer we do

not have to live less fully. Medicines help us

increase our capacity to play, cheer us up. In

using them we experience the present, we

become newly attuned to the richness of each

moment of life. One can achieve happiness by

letting go, by taking life as it comes, becoming

less serious.

EMPOWERMENT: The efficient, potent and

active agents promise to boost

decisiveness, to increase our capacity for

emotional growth and to make us face

reality with energy, self-confidence and

focus, and even to enhance our capacities

and characteristics. Medicines are growth

enhancers. Not content with the normal

human body and the need to restore it in

case of a disease, we seek to increase its

potentialities. For humans, health is a

feeling of assurance in life to which no

limit is fixed. As there is no upper limit to

normal, medicines help us nourish the

illusion that we can be indestructible,

invincible.

SECURITY: On an even deeper level, through

medicines we buy hope that recovery is just

around the corner. Anything that provides

ground for hope is capable of encouraging the

immune system to be more liberal with its

precious resources. To succeed and grow we

must be happy. Placebo exists in all societies

and cultures. It is a symbol by which faith is

sustained. Like children, we seek immediate

comfort, we cannot wait a moment, even

though ultimately the uncomfortable symptoms

are created by the body to expel some threat.

Medicines were used through history as

candies - a permissible form of consuming

sweetness.

TRANSFORMATION: On the innermost

layer of human motivation, we consider

medicines wonder products, agents of

change, formidable transformers.

Intrinsically, health is a process of

adaptation to new norms of life.

Medicines are magic molecules which

change the substance of the ailing body.

Contradictive and ambivalent, medicines

are catalysts and executors of mutations.

When the change comes it is remarkable.

The person can move from one state to

another, change personalities, adopt any

role.

Medicines are goods whose

meaning is versatile and

easy to change to

accommodate the user’s

particular wants, wishes,

expectations and hopes.

Medicines modify, mimic, alter perceptions, activate receptors, counter the effects of hormones and transmitters, inhibit enzyme activity, catalyze, promote chemical changes, modify inborn predispositions, fragment reality, distort cognition, transform the self, raise the dead. They do not only act on a physical level but they also create satisfaction, repair intimate relationships, change moods, transform lives. Agents that modulate lifestyles rather than cure diseases, some drugs mask reality to make it more palatable.

Like all magical things the dosage of medicine is a ritual – to be repeated daily, at the same times. The impression of magic is intensified by medicines’ small size and the significant changes they produce in the body, mind or both. Moreover, medicines can be used privately and secretly. We expect from high-science technology, which has replaced magic, results here and now, to feel better from the first dose. Magic blue pills, and fountains of youth, do not just instantly heal and relieve or make sex happen, but reconstruct the individual.

Before science entered medicine, the secrets of

health were withheld by older people, sages

and shamans. We still believe in magic cures,

except now they have transformed themselves

into scientific formulas, concocted in mysterious

laboratories using chemical and test tube

witchcraft to come up with elixirs of

youth. Paradoxically, the more we master

science, the larger the role played by mystery

in the healing process becomes.

This map illustrates

the way some

major brands in

the global

pharmaceutical

industry are

positioned in the

consumers’ mind

Deep category understanding is just the first step in creating engaging narratives. To build a proposition that is deeply engaging, the brand must germinate the bare motives that drive the category in a unique and profoundly human way.

Having captured, for the first time, our fundamental human motives at the deepest levels of their deployment, all the way from:• their biological value • to the neurosystems they engage• to the cognitive operations and

psychological states they activate• to the major social reinforcers they

cause and • to the rich hierarchy of inherent

concepts they infuse into our everyday life,

• BRAND AVIATORS™ helps marketers develop Intrinsically Engaging Narratives™

Based on in-depth research and practical implementation, BRAND AVIATORS™ helps marketers develop brands with a solid inner architecture deeply rooted in the fundamental human motives, using a three-phase methodology

Phase 1: Map the territory

The first phase of the methodology deconstructs the fundamental human motives driving the sales and profit of the category, establishes the relevant psychographic territories and reveals the way that the brands are mapped in people’s mind

Phase 2: Give soul to your brand

To be authentic and engaging, narratives must always be sourced from the core of the brand. The second phase captures the core of the brand, and mobilises its genuine codes in order to satisfy our common motivations relative to the category.

Phase 3: Enrich people’s lives

Powerful strategies require effective articulation. In this third phase, the consumer proposition is translated into ownable experiences written in the language that uses our primary emotions as structural elements.

There is a direct correlation

between our fundamental

human motives and the level of

sales and profit

Nothing fuels creativity more than understanding and mobilising our fundamental motives and the rich hierarchy of inherent concepts they infuse into our everyday life

The efficiency of communication budgets is maximised when the authentic codes of the brand match the deepest motives which drive sales and profit in the category. Nowadays, we have no excuse for saying that “we waste half of our advertising budget but we don’t know which half”.

Above all, by founding brand strategy on our fundamental human motives, and by embedding Intrinsically Engaging Narratives™

the brand becomes deeply humanistic in that it offers holistic, universal experiences that no longer simply satisfy some individual needs but the needs of the species

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