When you pick up a prescription of Viagra, Lunesta, Advair, or Paxlovid, you might wonder how drugs get their mystifying brand names. Do pharmaceutical executives sit around a conference table and blurt out sounds or syllables or scribble them down until they conjure a unique name that suits the drug they’ve developed? The reality is not that simple.
Even though people enjoy poking fun at pharmaceutical brand names, says Scott Piergrossi, president of Creative at the Brand Institute, a name-development firm based in Miami, they should understand that drug brand names incorporate safeguards that minimize medication errors caused by name confusion. “The names are very well thought out in a hugely iterative process,” he says.
Although the naming of a
