Which companies do Americans associate most with weight loss medication? If you answered Eli Lilly or Novo Nordisk, think again. The two leading obesity drug makers were relegated to third and fourth spot behind a pair of companies without an authorized weight loss medicine between them.
Caliber, a company that helps businesses monitor their reputation, generated the results by asking more than 15,000 people in 13 countries questions about weight loss drugs. Globally, Novo Nordisk, the drug developer that established the modern weight loss market with Wegovy, tied for first place on the list of companies that people associated with the sector.
Strong awareness in Denmark, Novo’s home country, drove the maker of Wegovy and Ozempic to the top of the charts. Outside of Denmark, where 82% of people associated Novo with weight loss drugs, the company’s role in tackling overweight and obesity is less well known.
In the U.S., 27% of respondents named Pfizer as a company associated with weight loss drugs. Pfizer has treatments for overweight and obesity in development but is yet to bring a weight loss drug to market. Lilly and Novo, the companies with leading FDA-approved weight loss drugs, were associated with the category by 17% and 15% of respondents, respectively.
AstraZeneca, another player with investigational, but not approved, weight loss molecules, took the second spot. Twenty-two percent of surveyed Americans associated the Anglo-Swedish company with the drug category. Being associated with the category could help AstraZeneca and Pfizer if they bring weight loss drugs to market, but the premature link to overweight and obesity meds could also create complications.
“Ordinarily, companies entering a market later can learn from others’ mistakes,” Caliber said in its report. “But Pfizer and AstraZeneca are already in the game, whether they like it or not—which suggests they may need to help the sector win this narrative sooner rather than later.”
Caliber’s comment about the narrative refers to other findings of the survey, which revealed a belief that weight loss drugs are an expensive “quick fix” for a lifestyle disease. More than 70% of people globally said pharma companies are taking advantage of a global health crisis, although most of the respondents also believe the industry is helping solve the crisis.
“For drug companies, this narrative may be something of a reputational millstone, one they would do well to shed. But how? Well, for one thing, they could do a better job of educating the public about the causes of obesity,” Caliber said. If the survey is right, that reputational millstone is more of a burden for Pfizer and AstraZeneca than Lilly and Novo in the U.S.