From Advertisment to Marketing: Pharmaceutical Enterprises, Patients, Physicians and the Construction of Medical Markets

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Volker Hess
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2009 to 2014
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 93283625

The project will analyze the marketing of modern drugs as an heuristic approach for understanding the modern medical market. The industrial mass production, the use of communications media in marketing, the specialization of and the differentiation within the medical market (inpatient or outpatient treatment), the increasing internationalization of the market and last but not least the blessings and promises of the post World War II "therapeutic revolution": All these trends have allowed for the evolution of an ever more complex network of actors, institutions, interests, and power structures. With the focus on a short 20th century (1914-1990) the project is conceived of as a comparative study between France and West Germany, as an "histoire croisee" (entangled history) which developments (scientific marketing) in their own specific national effects. This will especially be the case for the challenge posed by the US-American success in combining research with marketing. Which answers were found in each country-specific research, business, law, and social systems? What kind of French and German cultures of marketing developed out of the confrontation with American marketing methods?

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: France
• Participating Person: Professor Dr. Jean-Paul Gaudillière