Something that recently caught my eye on my news app on my iPhone was that Viagra had dropping sales in its revenue both domestically and abroad. Curious, I looked into it. In his article “How Viagra Went from a Medical Mistake to a $3-Billion-Dollar-a-Year Industry”, David Kushner covers the same topic by explaining how exactly Viagra was created, reaching back from it’s creation in the 1990s to the expiring patent on its main chemical compound in the present day. This patent, which has already been nonexistent of expired in other parts of the world, will dissolve by 2020 in the US, destroying the monopoly that Pfizer has had on the most viable anti-impotence drug in the world.

One of the four topics covered in this course, unintended consequences and unacknowledged assumption (Idea 4), directly interacts with Viagra as a product itself. Viagra wasn’t originally created as a product for impotence, but as an aid for those with severe chest pain. Viagra was supposed to expand the blood vessels in study patient’s chests to allow better blood flow and reduce pain, but as it turned out, the chest wasn’t the only place affected. Study patients described headaches, muscle aches, and, for some, cured impotence, which had up to this point in time been declared untreatable by the medical society at large. This literal side effect had the metaphorical side effect of creating the multi-billion-dollar industry of Viagra on the medical market and its generic competitors on the black market. 

Another large topic covered by this article (and perhaps the most important) was the interaction between business, state, and society (Idea 3). The first subgroup of these interactions encountered by Pfizer was the interaction between business and society. Before the created drug could hit the market, Pfizer first had to determine if there could be a market in the first place. America is a place that is slow to change its perceptions in many areas, and sex was one of them. Many men would be nervous to discuss their impotence with anyone, including their doctors. In order for Viagra to have a good relationship with their consumer base, the Viagra sales team knew that they had to pull all of the stops. They named Viagra the way it is for no other reason than because they needed a name that started with a V, as products that began with Vs were statistically better at getting uncertain customers. Also, due to the social stigma surrounding the word impotence, they renamed the occurrence, dubbing it “Erectile Dysfunction” so that men could see this as something happing to them and not as some kind of personal failure that degraded their masculine self-perception. The phrase caught on so well that ED has now become a mainstream medical term due to its phycological effectiveness on the public at large. However, public relations were not improved by only the corporate level. Every tier of the company from management down received training on marketing techniques to change the social perspective of their prospective customers. This training went down all the way to the sales teams that worked in the trenches: 

With everything ready to go, the team booked a massive launch meeting at the World Center Marriott in Orlando, Florida, to introduce Viagra to Pfizer’s three thousand sales representatives. The average sales rep was a good-looking twenty-five-year-old— “The guy looked like a quarterback, and the girl looked like freaking Candy the cheerleader,” Nelson says—but that didn’t make the challenge any easier. “We needed to make them comfortable with talking about sex,” he says. They did this by getting everyone used to saying all the right words. They went around the room and had everybody say erection five times. “Erection! Erection! Erection! Erection! Erection!” 

The second of the interactions was one between business and state. Now that Pfizer thought that they could rely on a stable market, they needed government approval through the FDA. Some other parts of the government had been relentless in their efforts to block Viagra’s production, distribution, and sale, with lobbying groups taking firm stances as well. Pfizer wasn’t sure that their $100 million investment would pay off, but they were confident enough to put in the last push to finish what they had started. They passed with flying colors, and Viagra was finally ready for the market.