May I have some Advil (ibuprofen)?

For my media(ted) art(i)FACT I brought in a Target brand bottle of ibuprofen. On the bottle it says “compare to active ingredient in Advil Ibuprofen tablets.” Advil is the name almost everyone immediately thinks of when they go to get a bottle of ibuprofen; I have many times by mistake referred to ibuprofen in general as Advil. But does that make it any different than the generic brands of the medicine? Probably not. But if you think that a brand of medicine works better than another then it might effectively do that for you as a result of the placebo effect. I previously wrote a blog post on the placebo effect and it’s pretty interesting; it has been proven time and time again that if we believe that a type of medicine works even if it is just a placebo, the placebo can affect us in ways that the real medicine would. Therefore if we think Advil works better than the Target brand Ibuprofen, it might for us even if the medicines themselves are exactly the same.

On the topic of name brands versus generic brands in general, Sabrina pointed out to me that the Target brand is really its own name brand. She told me that people actually want to buy the Target brand over other brands. Apparently the Target brand name is “up&up” which I didn’t even notice. Now that I look at the bottle again I do see the up&up logo; I had no idea previously that it was a Target brand though, I just knew that I bought it at Target. Because I didn't recognize the brand name and because it said compare to active ingredient in Advil, I just assumed that it was a generic brand, but it really isn't. When compared to a different brand of ibuprofen people may think that they should get the "up&up" brand instead, maybe even instead of Advil. The Target brand ibuprofen is cheaper than Advil and is probably a happy medium between an entirely unknown ibuprofen brand and the most well known. For many of us brand names do influence decisions to buy certain products over others. Though maybe some will prefer Target brand medicine over Advil itself, brand names often “mediate” buying decisions in some form or another.