Informatologia, Vol. 48 No. 3-4, 2015.
Preliminary communication
CONSUMERS IN SLOVENIA AND ADVERTISING OF NON-PRESCRIPTION MEDICINES
Malči Grivec
; School of Business and Management Novo mesto, Slovenia
Abstract
Modern information society enables the consumer to search for any information at any time, but the information quality can be questionable. Moreover, the Internet and television blur the boundaries of the advertising, allowing the consumer to be confronted with ads for products and services of any country, regardless of the national restrictions. The aforementioned facts are particularly problematic in the field of medicinal products. Pharmaceutical companies enable more resources and funding for medicine advertising from year to year. Slovenia is not an exception. Although, medicine advertising in Slovenia is highly regulated. Thus, it is permitted to advertise only non-prescription medicines to the end-consumer, while prescription drugs can be advertised only to professionals, that is, persons who are authorized to prescribe or supply medicine products. Such arrangement is known in most of the world, the only exceptions are the United States and New Zealand, where advertising of prescription medicines is also allowed. In this article we briefly introduce the concept of marketing communication, with the greatest emphasis placed on advertising. After that we present the rules for medicine advertising in the world and in Slovenia and analyse the expenditures for the medicine advertising. In the last part of the article we represent our results of the research in Slovenia, through which we examined the extent to which consumers trust the information in the medications adverts. Besides that, we also studied the consumers and doctors attitudes towards to advertising in general and their relation to the advertising of non-prescription medicines. We were particularly interested in whether the attitude towards this type of advertising among consumers and physicians vary.
Keywords
marketing communication; advertising; advertising of medicine; Slovenia
Hrčak ID:
151673
URI
Publication date:
31.12.2015.
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