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Bio-twitter Speaks: The Best Brand Names In Biotech

This article is more than 8 years old.

Hershey. Harley-Davidson. Nike.

Cheerios. Crest. Leggo. Stratocaster.

All great brand names – single words that invoke a consistent image, one that’s generally favorable and reflects, if not dominance, than at least a major presence in a market.

In Entrepreneurship in Biotechnology, we spend one class session on marketing, and briefly touch on brands and advertising. Are there great brands in biotech? Or is the industry too young, the companies too small and the product life cycles too short?

To investigate further, I conducted a ((biased and extremely unscientific)) poll over a 24 hour period, asking my bio-twitter feed to nominate their ideas for the biotechnology industry’s best brand names.

There were 90 total votes. Responses generally fell into two categories: company names and product names. Most responses were serious (I can see one or two that may have been tongue in cheek—this is twitter after all.) One responder also nominated two medical centers (Fred Hutchinson and Sloan Kettering.)

The raw data:

Genentech 10
Biogen 9
Amgen 7
Gilead 6
Viagra 5
Lipitor 4
Celgene 4
Pfizer 3
Roche 3
Johnson & Johnson 2
Tylenol 2
Merck 2
Herceptin 2
Avastin 2
Prozac 2
Novartis 2
WuXi 2
Band-Aid 1
Bayer 1
Blue 1
Aspirin 1
Introgen 1
Valeant 1
Vicodin 1
Z-Pak 1
Zoloft 1
Prilosec 1
Ambien 1
Xanax 1
Mylan 1
Regeneron 1
Humira 1
Pharmacyclics 1
Rituxan 1
Genzyme 1
Regeneron 1
Bristol Myers 1
Sanofi 1
Vertex 1
Monsanto 1

A worthwhile exercise? Debatable. A list of answers that contains Pfizer and Novartis, Genentech and Biogen, Band-Aid, Z-Pak, Introgen and Blue suggests a pretty poorly worded question. Despite these limitations, there may be a lesson embedded in the responses. I’ll let you know what the students think.