While the discovery of Viagra is certainly significant, it is not what has changed the world. There were other treatments for what was referred to as impotence prior to the discovery of Viagra. What has changed the world is the marketing of this wonder drug. Thus, this dissertation examines the marketing of Viagra to identify the persuasive strategies that Pfizer has used to constitute a nation of ED sufferers and Viagra users as well as promote a drug that is arguably the most famous (or infamous) in the history of modern medicine. These strategies illustrate that there have been four keys to creating the Viagra juggernaut: (1) presuming and asserting a collective identity for consumers taking the drug; (2) offering a narrative that demonstrates this identity; (3) issuing a call to action that affirms this identity; and (4) packaging and selling the drug like a traditional consumer good. The first three of these represent the basic principles of the genre and theory known as constitutive rhetoric (Charland, 1987, 2001; Stein, 2002), which has traditionally been applied to the study of political, not marketing, communication. The fourth one is the underlying principle of all direct-to-consumer (DTC) prescription drug advertising.
