Early phase communication planning – why is it important?

The moment you have something to say about your product you have begun the communication process. And you have created the first impression of your product. Often, this is an informal, internal phenomenon. But by the time your CEO heads off to brief financial analysts on a promising new product in the company’s portfolio, the communication process is advanced. Already many people within the company will have formed an impression of this promising new chemical entity (NCE) and perhaps the scientists in the discovery team will have characterised it quite considerably.

Many pharmaceutical companies now accept the need for communication planning by the time an NCE is in Phase 2b or Phase 3. But is that really early enough? What perhaps still needs to be recognised is that, by this time, a considerable amount of communication has taken place. Much of it may be informal and perhaps most of it is internal. However, unless it is clear, consistent and robust, you will be missing important opportunities. If these early communications are left to chance, doesn’t this raise questions over of clarity, consistency and robustness? And if clarity, consistency and robustness are absent, how can external audiences possibly get anything but mixed, or even worse, confused or contradictory messages?

The saying goes that “It’s important to have a vision of your cathedral when you are laying the foundations.” It is certainly very true in the world of medical communications. So what are the ingredients that go into the mix to prepare the foundations, enabling your “cathedral” to stand the test of time? The answer is: key messages. By “key message” I mean: a short, succinct statement that summarises the highest level sentiment the company wishes to communicate. It sounds simple but it is not. From the start, your key messages have to capture everything that is important about your product. Yet if key messages grow in number beyond what your customers can be expected to remember, they cease to be “key”. Of course, key messages can be expressed in a number of different ways – different audiences need to be addressed in different ways – but that is very different from sacrificing clarity, consistency and robustness. Expressing key messages in different ways is managed through a hierarchical system including sub-messages: different ones for, say, clinical research scientists compared with those for medical columnists in newspapers.

Early Phase Communications are central in achieving the goals of communication – changing behaviours. However large or small that change is, when we have a new molecule or NCE and we are proposing an advance in treatment options, we want to change the status quo. And here is the most important point in the whole strategy – if you are going to change behaviours, you have to change the beliefs behind them. This means you have to start at the beginning, with your product’s core concept, and develop everything clearly, consistently and with robustness, from that. This should encompass not only the positive aspects of your product but also any off-target pharmacology – a sound risk management approach. Too often, risk management only enters the vocabulary when a crisis has occurred. Take a look at some of the products that have been withdrawn from the market and ask yourself: did they begin their communication planning early enough? Were they as open and clear about off-target pharmacology as they were about their product’s benefits?

Perhaps we are not just in the business of changing the beliefs of clinicians?