Pharmaceutical companies compete with one another for the markets thus generated. Because the synthetic chemical commodities they produce are frequently similar pharmacologically and clinically, each company must differentiate its compound in some way from competing commodities. "In the tricyclic market, there is no remarkable drug that's going to come in and sweep away other compounds, "since none of the new agents is "remarkably more effective as an antidepressant. What they are going to do is divide this market up into smaller and smaller shares" [13, p.8]. Corporate competition for market shares is therefore conducted around advertising and marketing strategies designed to set apart each compound. Successful or not, these marketing approaches contribute to a market in which a principal differentiator of each product is its sign.

However, because these drug compounds are legally categorized as prescription drugs, marketers cannot directly address those who comprise the market as immediate consumers (depressed patients). Therefore, the actual market for these commodities are the physicians who mediate patient's consumption of such drugs [24, p. 167]. Physician's decisions become the conduit to expansion or contraction of a pharmaceutical company's control over shares of particular markets. Advertising in medical journals constitutes one important way of capturing market shares by influencing physicians' prescribing patterns for these drugs (see [4] for a review of studies of advertising impact on prescribing rates).⁶

Devising and applying marketing strategies is contingent on the structural relationships between pharmaceutical corporations, federal regulatory agencies, physicians, and consumers. Organizing the distribution of drugs as a set of market relations influences the nature of social relations between Companies and physicians, between physicians and patients, as well as the social relations of defining illness. The principal objective of the marketing strategy used for antidepressants such as Ludiomil^® and Desyrel^® is to establish an associative connection between the product brandname and a visual symbol. With Ludiomil^® the advertising goal is to fix in physicians' minds a correlational identity between the meaning of Ludiomil^® and the meaning of the rose so that the latter stands for the drug's curative powers. From the Campaign's inception, the rose stands in metaphoric contrast to metaphors of bleakness and dryness. Casting the rose as a correlative for Ludiomil^® endows it with the meaning of Ludiomil^® as an antidepressant drug, and thus permits it to stand independently as a sign that signals Ludiomil^® as an appropriate treatment for depression. This is how the rose becomes a carry-over symbol for Ludiomil. ^®Indeed, the manifest goal of the marketing campaign is that sight of the 'the rose' will remind physicians of Ludiomil.^® Hence, an additional aspect of the marketing strategy includes provision of other promotional materials with the rose image imprinted on them.

Advertising campaigns such as these presume readers possess a shared knowledge of interpretive rules and conventions. This background knowledge is a product of prior experiences of recognizing and deciphering ads. How, for example, do readers recognize the nature of the relationship between words and pictures in these ads? In most current psychotropic drug ads, the key words of captions introduce, in the context of apposition to the pictures, ambiguous meanings. The caption refers to both image and drug, first differentiating, and then joining the meanings, if only in their mutual relation of ambiguity. In the Desyrel^® ads, 'New Light' points in two directions: denotatively, through the picture, to the moment following an eclipse; connotatively, it evokes a symbolic meaning that refers to the action of the substance named Desyrel.^® In fact, the advertising format common to these ads is structured to fuse together variant readings of the same text. Mixing, joining and confusing sets of meanings sets up the possibility of making a connection between the meaning of a drug and the meaning of the symbolic image. To marketers this is a prerequisite to generating a carry-over' symbol, which is functionally the same as producing a commodity sign -- a process of augmenting the value of a product by joining it to a culturally valued image [26]. Though firms compete for shares of the antidepressant market via their differentiated signs, in every case the sign metaphorically indicates a state of mental health generated by the named commodity.

The process of creating a carry-over symbol entails a subtle reification of both depression and its treatment. Though pharmaceutical companies and their marketing agents claim these ads impart information about drugs to physicians, they actually set forth ready-made formulae for resolving a widely inclusive range of psychological maladies. These reified formulas are the logical interpretive outcome of structuring the ads to efficiently yield carry-over symbols. Such reified perspectives do not guarantee a single interpretation will be made of these ads, but they are the most probable given the structuring of communication in the ads. Analytically dismantling the interpretive procedures that underlie the process of making sense of these ads illustrates the probability. Three interpretive procedures called forth by the structure of the ads, include: (1) abstraction, (2) equivalency, (3) reification [22]. Though these occur simultaneously in the process of deciphering these ads, we employ the analytic fiction that each can be treated separately.