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Excedrin Headache #411: MrConsumer

Excedrin box

Novartis, the maker of Excedrin, has suffered from a bad headache for the past nine months because it had to recall all Excedrin products from store shelves. Apparently, they had a little problem with mixing pills from other Novartis products in Excedrin bottles, and according to the FDA they also had a little issue with contamination and ignoring consumer complaints.

The company announced last week, however, that it was resuming production, and that Excedrin will be back on store shelves soon.

Now seems the appropriate time therefore to shed a little light on the smoke and mirrors marketing tactics of the company.

People who suffer from migraine headaches may well turn to specialized products for their particular condition. One such product is Excedrin Migraine.

On their website, Novartis says that Excedrin Migraine is the “first non-prescription medicine approved by the FDA to treat all the symptoms of a migraine.”

Sounds great. But how is Excedrin Migraine different from regular Extra Strength Excedrin?

*MOUSE PRINT:  It isn’t. When you look at their ingredients statements, you learn that they both contain exactly the same active ingredients in the same proportions.

Here is the ingredients listing for Excedrin Migraine:

Excedrin Migraine

And here is the ingredients listing for regular Extra Strength Excedrin:

Excedrin Extra Strength

It is interesting to note that regular Excedrin has many clinical uses, but the migraine version only lists one. Of course, both of them should be capable of doing the exact same things.

So the question is why does Novartis have a specialized migraine product when their regular one is really identical?  Here is their answer:

As you may be aware, Excedrin Migraine received approval from the Food and Drug Administration on January 14, 1998 as the first over the counter product indicated to relieve the pain of mild to moderate migraine headache.

Excedrin Migraine contains 250 mg of Acetaminophen, 250 mg of aspirin and 65 mg of caffeine per tablet. It is the same Extra Strength Excedrin formulation, which has been on the market for over twenty years. When our clinical studies showed that this formulation was also effective for the relief of migraine headache pain, it had been our intention to simply add this information to our existing Extra Strength Excedrin labeling. The Food and Drug Administration, however, required that we market Excedrin Migraine as a separate product because Excedrin Migraine has important patient information, instructions and warnings for use in treating the pain of migraine. This information does not appear on Extra Strength Excedrin. This was the only reason that we came out with a separate product.

I am sure the company did’t protest too much because this gave them a great new marketing angle.

And maybe that gave the company a new idea that they could market the same exact pills under different names and increase their sales. Enter Excedrin Menstrual Complete:

Excedrin Menstrual Complete

Bet you can’t guess what their magical mix of three ingredients is in this product.

*MOUSE PRINT: 

Excedrine Mensrual

Yep. It has the exact same three ingredients in the exact same proportions as Excedrin Extra Strength and Excedrin Migraine.

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Avis: $30 Off Your Next Rental?

Mouse Print* reader Marc D. recently got a mail offer promising $30 off his next Avis rental if he would give them his email address.

Avis $30 offer

What he didn’t realize until after he received his $30 coupon was the offer was really $30 off a weekly rental.

*MOUSE PRINT:

Avis coupon

Since Marc’s “next rental” was not going to be a weekly one, he felt hoodwinked.

Mouse Print* wrote to Avis, asking what happened, and whether they would honor the no-strings-attached $30 offer for those who received the original offer.

“As a result of a printing error, the promotional insert did not specify that the offer was for a “weekly” rental. However, “weekly” is mentioned in several other places, including the outer envelope (see attached), the website/page where the customer provides his/her information to redeem the offer (www.avis.com/email) and the subsequent email offer. The erroneous promotional inserts have been discarded. New inserts have been printed and are currently being used.” — Avis spokesperson.

Fair enough, the disclosure WAS on the webpage where consumers had to sign-up, but was not on the offer sheet they received by mail. Some consumer protection advertising rules, however, state that the subsequent disclosure of the actual terms of an offer does not diminish the deceptive nature of the original offer that did not disclose those terms.

And what will Avis do for consumers who felt mislead about this offer?

“The $30 offer is being accepted on weekly rentals.” — Avis spokesperson.

In other words, nothing.

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Here We Downsize Again – Part 3 (2012)

Last week, ABC World News with Diane Sawyer covered the issue of downsized grocery products spotlighting those discovered by MrConsumer and Mouse Print* readers (see their pictures). Click the picture below to view the video:

ABC World News

Here are some more examples:

*MOUSE PRINT:

Raisin Bran

Kellogg’s recently reduced the sizes of its raisin bran cereal. In this case, it went from 15 oz. to 13.7 oz., but miraculously, it still has two scoops of raisins. (They must be using smaller scoops.)

*MOUSE PRINT:

Kashi

Kashi Strawberry Fields cereal recently downsized from 10.4 ounces to 10.3 ounces. Big deal, you say. But wait, there’s more, as Ron Popeil would say. A quick look at the nutrition label reveals that the old box gave you nine one-cup servings of cereal, but the new one only gives you five cups. What happened? They reformulated the product by adding more whole grains. That made the flakes denser and heavier. And they are still charging $4.59 a box even though you are getting over 40% fewer servings. Thanks to Jenn Z. for the tip on Kashi.

*MOUSE PRINT:

Pillsbury

Duncan Hines

Both Pillsbury and Duncan Hines followed Betty Crocker’s lead (which we reported on here) and downsized their 18.25 ounce cake mixes. They still claim to make 24 cupcakes and the same size cakes, but as our Pillsbury test on ABC revealed, there was barely enough batter for 21.

As the price for raw materials and transportation continues to go up, manufacturers will continue to downsize their products. It is up to us to catch their packaging shenanigans, because they certainly are not going to tell us “look smaller size” or “look, sneaky price increase.”

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