52 weeks, 52 words - Week 7: Unity

It would seem logical to suggest that the construction of a scientific narrative and alignment on its fundamental tenets would easily diffuse into every facet of a brand’s strategy and outwardly facing communications. Like water on pavement, it would seem intuitive that it finds every crack. Yet, experience has shown that there is a disconnected narrative within our industry and we are living in drought conditions.

Our clients likely have the best of intentions and rarely (I say rarely because there have been at least a few times in my career that the circumstances of such disarray can only be explained by sheer stupidity, abject naivete, or a callous indifference) seek to deliberately fragment their communications. Yet they do.

Time and time again, a unified scientific narrative will either not exist or not effectively get pulled through across workstreams.

While not as common, I have seen a disconnect between the narrative structure and proof points within a department, but the most insidious variation on this lack of cohesion tends to be when work is done in silos.

Most often that siloed phenomenon intra-department occurs when the work is either sliced too finely between agency partner (for example, a disconnect between oral presentations, posters, and publications) or when the mandate from global to local is abandoned midstream. It’s not uncommon to see a lack of unity across digital channels, market access, and professional promotions, or between patient/DTC work and medical affairs. Given the diversity of stakeholders and the sometimes-dizzying number of agency partners of platform-specific verticals, a great burden is placed on a primary pharma client stakeholder to be the tie that binds at the epicenter. 

Ironically, one area where unity is massively under-emphasized is in connecting the peer-to-peer content narrative to that of the framework being introduced to sales representatives vis-à-vis training.

Ironic in the sense that the client at the nucleus of the development of this work is more often than not the same one. The commercial lead – be it a product manager or VP, marketing – is ultimately responsible for equipping two key groups of individuals with a brand story and entrusting each with the responsibility of being the mouthpiece for communicating the brand’s value proposition.

Both of these stakeholder groups are routinely trained and routinely derided, albeit separately, for the failings or gross inadequacies of the instruments they have been given. Trainings come and trainings go; trainings focus on speaker/presenter skills or effectively answering questions. But, in general, neither training ultimately comes to the nexus of their individual problems (the content and the narrative) or the problem when looking at them together from a macro level.

It’s an aria we’ve been singing in our organization for nearly a decade now and it’s foundation when contextualized to clients is one that nearly immediately produces an “a-ha” moment – one with such a peculiar obviousness at its simplicity yet a curiousness like it’s a revelation on par with the introduction of the iPhone as a transcendent technology. In the core workstreams of brand marketing, everyone strives to elevate content. In fact, elevating content in and of itself is big business. And framing an offering from the agency to the client around medical storytelling has almost become passé and de rigueur. 

No, the light bulb goes off when we suggest a unity and a platform to ensure unity between the story being told by the sales representative in a sales detail and the story being told by a HCP speaker in any variety of peer-to-peer settings.

Offering a unity to the training experience through a common agency is both novel and banal. Yet the results are anything but. They are, without hyperbole, transformative.

I have described here before the ethos that drives toward behavior change. Woven into that mindset is the recognition that human nature is encoded with a mechanism to avoid risk and uncertainty. Chaos and confusion prevail in a splintered set of circumstances. And even when it may be against our best interests, evolution has entrenched a notion that when presented with uncertainty or a lack of clarity, the easiest thing to do is to keep doing what we’ve always done. 

If a sales representative engages a customer on a Tuesday afternoon in the clinic and that customer then attends a company-sponsored speaker program at a local steakhouse to hear a noted key opinion leader present a speaker deck, one would hope that the “red thread” that unifies the two unique conversations would be immediately visible.

After all, both were created by the same marketing team and both were reviewed by the same MLR team. Unfortunately, more often than not, though, the agency that created the sales collateral did not train the representative (or didn’t have an expertise in adult learning and instructional design) and the agency that created the speaker deck and trained the speaker were not the same.

That lack of unity has resulted in a facsimile of the brand strategy, nuanced if not altogether different lexicons for the copy, and a fractured experience where the HCP who is on the receiving end of the two messages isn’t hearing it in stereo. Most likely, and likely subconsciously, they are hearing the dissonance in the chords and remaining precisely where they are, comfortably continuing to adhere to the status quo.

A unified orchestral symphony playing from the same sheet of music has a tone and timber of exquisite harmony; the cacophony of multiple instruments out of sync, out of rhythm, and out of practice is simply noise.

It’s the difference between my kids banging on a piano and drum set haphazardly and a virtuoso dynamically attuned to every beat in the cadence in perfect pitch!

Seeking a unified lexicon and a unified training experience takes a special agency orientation and team structure and doesn’t happen overnight.

It takes practice and repetition, and a discipline to mobilize the responsible parties to believe it can be done.When done well and with discipline, unity across communications channels and unity across departments is sweet music to my ears. Music has its own unique ability to create a groundswell, to raise hear rates, and lift the listeners out of their chairs.

Talk about an activation… I can hear an angel chorus off in the distance already!

?