I tend to pay attention to pharma TV ads (and sometimes I write about them like here and here). It makes me a bit strange, I know, as most people tend to go out of their way to avoid these commercials. This has been a minor obsession of mine for a while, so I've built up quite an anecdotal set of observations about these ads. The one thing that continues to stand out for me is the names of these drugs.

It's almost a cliche when it comes to pharma drug names. They tend to be difficult to spell and even more difficult to say. The urban legend goes that they are named this way to make them more memorable...at least that's what a pharma marketer told me once.

Being a data-driven person, I wondered if this was a selective memory thing or if the names of approved drugs really are remarkably complicated and unlike "average" words. So, I did my own analysis.

METHODS

I looked up all approved pharma drugs from 2010-2016 (you can find them here). I also researched what the average incidence of every letter, in any position, in a standard dictionary. I also looked up the incidence of letters that start words. These were conveniently supplied by Wikipedia.

All of the raw data for my little study can be found in this Google Sheet if you're really interested.

FINDINGS AND ANALYSIS

Pharma companies do love to name their drugs using rather uncommon letters. They like to both start their drug names with these letters and mix them throughout the name.

Consider this, the most commonly used letter in English is E. It accounts for 12.7% of all letters used in all the words in the Concise Oxford dictionary. The letter Z, the least commonly used letter, accounts for only 0.07%.

But pharma seems to love Z. Here's a chart showing all the letters and how often they are used in the dictionary ("expected") versus how often they are used in pharma drug names ("observed").

For the drug names considered in this study, the letter Z accounts for 2.52% of all letters used. That's roughly 3,300% different than what would be expected (0.07%). Take a look at the chart below to see which other letters pharma uses WAY more than what would be expected based on the normal English language.

As you can see, Z has the largest absolute variance from what is expected. The next letter on the list (X), is only used around 1,100% more than expected. I should note that pharma seems to hate the letter W. It should account for around 2.36% of letters, but it only accounts for 0.06% when it comes to drug names. In fact, it was only used one time.

Congrats to the brave folks at Jazz Pharmaceutical for breaking with tradition. Wait! They used a Z also, so nevermind.

I also looked at the first letters of the drug names and compared these to the expected first letters of dictionary words. Here's the chart showing all of the letters.

When it comes to variance versus what we'd expect, the letter X jumps ahead of Z this time. The letter X starts 0.02% of English words (the least common), but 4.05% of pharma drug names (an almost 24,000% variance from expected). So maybe pharma marketers love X more than Z after all.

Of note, the only letters that didn't start at least one drug name was our poor friend W and the letter Q. That sort of surprised me. Why not Q? After all, it's used 500% more than what would be expected when you consider all letters. Sounds like an opportunity!

So, who's the big winner? Which drug name takes the prize as the most bizarrely named? This was a difficult one to figure out until I decided to use Scrabble letter scores to value each word. For those not familiar with Scrabble, I won't explain it here, but suffice it to say, each letter is worth a different point value based on its incidence in the English language. So, the letters E and A (for example, which are very common) are worth 1 point, while the letters Q and Z are worth 10 (the highest scoring and least common).

Drumroll please.

Meet Fulyzaq. Your winner with 31 points including using rarely used letters F and Y (each worth 4 points).

Fun fact, someone must have thought that Fulyzaq was a ridiculous name, as it was eventually changed:

Sadly, Mytesi is only worth a paltry 11 points.

So, given that there isn't technically a drug name Fulyzaq any longer, this means the crown must pass along to another (like the runner-up at the Miss America pageant stepping up to take crown when the winner appears in compromising photos). Your new champion:

Yes! It's Xeljanz. And if you are pronouncing this drug correctly, it's because you saw it on TV way too many times and not because you can easily apply standard English pronunciation rules to the word. Xeljanz is worth 30 points. No Fulyzaq to be sure, but still great. For the record, there's actually a tie at 30 points between Xeljanz and Krystexxa, but Krystexxa was disqualified because there's only one X in a standard Scrabble game.

And on the opposite side of the spectrum is the drug Ella. Approved in 2010, it's worth just 4 points. Sad.

One more observation, the average score for drug approved reach its peak in 2014 when the average score was 16.02.

SUMMARY

I'm not really sure where to begin (or end), but here's one thing...a plea to all pharma marketers (of which I was one once). Do your own thinking. Don't do what everyone else does. Here's yet another example where we can see that all pharma marketing pretty much looks the same (for another example, see my article The Bizarre Consistency of Pharma TV Commercials).

There's really the only thing that I think explains why all of these drugs seem to use a common naming convention, which I would classify as: using rarely used letters in bizarre combinations making for unpronounceable words.

Knowing what I know of pharma marketing agencies (of which there are a handful that are fully dedicated to this vertical), I wonder how many of these names came out of the same shop. How many came from the same company using their same, seemingly random formula for naming new drugs?

It might be time to look for some different thinking elsewhere. Maybe past experience in pharma marketing isn't

ABOUT

Why did I write this? I wanted to emphasize the point that you shouldn't rely on anecdotal evidence or your gut or your selective memory, when you can use data and figure out the answer. Sure, it seemed to me that pharma drug names were a little outrageous, but to really make this claim, I wanted to look at the actual data. And you should do the same.

That's one thing my agency, Dose, can help you do. We look at all of your marketing data and objectively answer what's working and what's not. If you're interested in that kind of thinking, get in touch.

And, of course, think differently. Work with people and agencies that have a broader exposure to different areas and different markets. Might find that the best thinking for pharma comes from people outside of pharma.