Great Promos for Doctors

Being a doctor’s wife has many perks. I can get a quick opinion when I have a sore throat or feel like I won’t live through a bout of the flu. And if I need a pen, there’s always one bearing the logo of Nexium or Lunesta lying around my house. More accurately, I could find these pens in my kitchen junk drawer, where hundreds of medical promos go to die.

My husband routinely brings home piles of goodies from pharmaceutical companies. When he forgot one of our early anniversaries, he jokingly handed me a black box as a gift. Inside was a tire-gauge kit from a drug rep. It was a bad idea because I didn’t get the joke. Like most other items he receives, this, too, migrated to our junk drawer.

Rifling through that drawer recently for batteries, I realized what little impact some items have. This got me thinking about what doctors really want. Are we in the promotional products industry filling that need? And, if we are, are these promos helping our clients achieve increased product awareness?

I set out to interview several docs to find which promotional products make the most impact. I started the interviews optimistic about finding the holy grail of promotional products, but what I actually found was surprising. Doctors, though enthusiastic about their favorite products, admitted trepidation about the ethical dilemmas of accepting gifts from pharmaceutical reps. They are aware of current and proposed regulations related to promotional gifts, and they know their patients follow this news, as well.

The landscape of promotions in the health care field is always in flux. How can we keep up and adapt to an uncertain climate? The key is to listen to our audience and understand its perspective. Below are the views of three family-medicine physicians. They see patients from all walks of life and prescribe medications for every ailment under the sun. They are our audience.

Useful and Unique

Dr. James Dom Dera has no problem recalling his favorite promotional gift. “It’s a miniature skeleton that I got from Pfizer and their medication Celebrex,” he says without hesitation. Every doctor’s office should have a skeleton, he says. Plus, his children enjoy it. “When my daughters visit, they come in and play with him, pulling off his arms and head,” he shares.

It was the uniqueness of this gift, he says, that’s led him to keep it for more than a decade. “We often get little trinkets like a wall clock or a ruler, but a skeleton is entirely out there – totally neat,” he says.

Dom Dera has also appreciated thumb drives, mini travel mice and a USB hub he once received. But for this seasoned physician, the best promos are those he can use in his private practice.

“Sometimes it’s not so much a gift, but some sort of gadget-based, health-risk calculator like a BMI (body-mass index) calculator,” he reports. “Those are much more useful than clocks and pens and paper; although the latter are the ones we get more often — they’re ubiquitous.”

He recommends that companies looking to distinguish themselves give useful and unique items. Pens and paper pads are