"Earning Consumers' Trust": How the Public Reputation of Pharmaceutical Brands Is Formed

The reputation of a pharmaceutical brand is considered a strategic asset of the company, which helps to manage its perception, as well as build trust between the brand and the end consumer. In the context of ambiguous media coverage of the category of antiviral drugs, the issue of managing and shaping the perception of the reputation of a pharmaceutical brand becomes more complicated. However, antiviral drugs have become one of the best-selling drugs in Russia for three years. In this work, an attempt was made to determine how the consumer perceives the reputation of pharmaceutical drugs in the antiviral category, on the basis of which assessment tools it determines the reputation as one that can be trusted; and how market professionals define strategies for shaping and managing perceptions of the reputation of pharmaceutical brands at the institutional level and how they align with consumer perceptions. An attempt was also made to draw a connection between the two levels of formation of brand reputation perception - consumer and institutional. The empirical material was collected based on data analysis of short texts (mentions) of social media, as well as a series of semi-structured interviews with market experts. The results of the study showed that the consumer operates with two systems of value judgments, which compete with each other from the standpoint of expertise. At the same time, brands manage two layers of perception of reputation, where the first one is used to dissect the judgments of users, and the second is designed to neutralize the reputation risks that have arisen in the first.