Of mice and marketing

Having recently joined the Wellmark team, my shift from pharmacology research to medical marketing was quite an adjustment at first.

I went from dosing mice with experimental compounds in a university lab, to crafting clinician- and patient-facing materials for newly approved therapies. The opposite ends of the drug lifecycle and, in many ways, opposite approaches to communication itself.

My scientific training taught me to interrogate data, design rigorous experiments and contribute to our understanding of how drugs work. But it also taught me to write in a way that, I now realise, has the potential to be a little too academic (literally).

The deeper you go into a subject, the harder it becomes to remember what it felt like not to understand it. Researchers aren’t poor communicators because they don’t care. The challenge is that expertise quietly erodes their ability to see through a non-expert’s eyes (psychologists call it ‘the curse of knowledge’).

In research, data is king. But when publishing findings, the focus isn’t necessarily on the reader.

The data takes centre stage in this situation. Is it robust? Ethical? Reproducible? Novel? Researchers tend to let the science speak for itself and assume the reader will extract whatever meaning they need – which is why reading medical journals can be, shall we say, an acquired taste. We’re asking readers to do the heavy lifting of interpretation.

In marketing and writing, the audience always comes first – and in medical writing, we need to take this a step further. We strive to take extraordinary care of our reader, whether they be an overworked, under-caffeinated clinician trying to stay current, or a patient navigating the vulnerability and uncertainty of a new diagnosis. The clinician doesn’t have time to decode dense prose. And the patient shouldn’t have to.

In other words, clarity is more than just good writing practice in this context. It’s an ethical obligation.

At Wellmark, clarity underpins everything we do. We distil complex science while navigating the competing demands of regulatory requirements, consumer behaviour, brand strategy and creative impact. Bringing it all together is where we thrive.

A personal favourite from our portfolio is the neuromyelitis optica spectrum disorder (NMOSD) awareness campaign that we developed for Amgen. NMOSD is a rare neurological disorder characterised by unpredictable, potentially debilitating autoimmune attacks. The challenge was that clinicians were understandably taking a ‘wait and watch’ approach to patients with NMOSD, given the precariousness of the condition – even though newer therapies offered the potential for better outcomes. Our campaign concept used a visual metaphor based on a well-known game of stability, accompanied by the headline ‘Are they really stable?’, to prompt prescribers to question this status quo.

To me, this is a good example of translating academic information into compelling communication. I started my career at the beginning of the drug lifecycle, asking whether something worked. Now I work at the other end, making sure people understand why and how it does.