What are the actual differences between name brand and generic/store brand medicines?
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***TL;DR:*** *The real only actual difference is marketing, but that’s actually a huge difference even if the content of the pill is pretty much exactly the same.*
Marketing includes advertising, and flyer coupons, and shelving location, and packaging, and sales promotions, and it all tries to create higher levels of awareness and the impression to a lot of people that the “brand name” is more trusted and therefore worth paying a lot more for.
Painkillers are a good example.
Name brands like “Aspirin” contain the same “acetylsalicylic acid” content as generic or drugstore-branded versions of “ASA”. The difference is that an awful lot of people recognize the word “aspirin” thanks to it being pounded into our heads over many decades of taking it ourselves as a child and then seeing the ads for it to reinforce it, and seeing it on a really obvious place on the shelf in the drug store, either at the end of a row or right there at most peoples’ eye level.
The same is true for Advil (medicine name is “Ibuprofen”) or Tylenol (“Acetaminophen” or “Paracetamol”) or Aleve (“Naproxen”). In almost all stores where there’s a dedicated painkiller section, those drugs are sold in both branded and generic format, but the branded versions are found with more colorful and larger visual elements on the shelf… and a corresponding higher price.
The drug companies also work hard to come up with novel ways to add “features” (example: easy-to-swallow caplets rather than pills, or fast-acting gelcaps rather than solid tablets) that upsell their product over the generic versions. There might be mild differences in how the drug is delivered, but the active ingredient is still the same.
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