Selling PR to R&D

Who else has had to convince a skeptical PhD or MD that, without a compelling personal story, media outreach won’t be effective? If you have ever felt that your first task in a presentation was to demonstrate that you don’t wear mouse ears at work, this post is for you.

To be fair, Research and Development management is right to be cautious about how they reach out to reporters. The list of what they cannot talk about is long. And, when they can talk, they must keep in mind the regulations around pre-approval promotion. PR firms that know their way through the ever increasing restrictions around product promotion and new product launches, are often unfamiliar with pipeline communication regulations.

In media interview training, I advise researchers to find analogies for their work to make it easier to understand. I use the same approach to explain the importance of storytelling to researchers. This is almost always a tough sell. To be effective a researcher must base his or her opinion on data. Not on emotion or wishful thinking. Storytelling can look frivolous, at best, at worst like pandering.

Here is the analogy I use to explain the role of storytelling to researchers. If it looks helpful to you, feel free to use it and please share here how you would improve or expand on it.

Authentic, compelling personal stories may not be as hard to discover as a new therapy, but they take research.

Research and Development	Media Relations
Target = cell receptor	Target = media favored by your target audience
Therapeutic Agent = molecule engineered to fit the cell receptor (needs to be tested for safety and effectiveness)	Therapeutic Agent = key message (needs to be tested for safety and effectiveness)
Adjuvant = a container or follow-on therapy to enhance effectiveness and improve outcome	Adjuvant = personal story about, or related to, the therapy
Example: an adjuvant will restore healing in a patient no longer responding to a therapeutic agent	Example: a story will give a reader a structure to remember facts that he or she would forget if presented as a list

Unless your message is extraordinarily powerful (ex: you’ve created the first synthetic cell or you’ve cured cancer), you will want to enhance it with an adjuvant to make it more effective. In media outreach, personal stories are your adjuvants. Without them, your therapy/message may bounce off the receptor/reporter or not stay long enough to be effective. With them, your therapy locks onto the receptor/reporter, shaping the article and more effectively gaining the attention of your audience.

Here is an example of an adjuvant from Merck used recently in “The Scientist:”

The Scientist –

Late at night, a feverish young girl shuffled into her father’s room complaining of a sore throat, Maurice Hilleman examined the swollen bumps on his daughter’s neck. It was 1963. She had the mumps, a common childhood disease at the time, caused by a virus that inflames the salivary glands. Most cases are mild, but severe infections can induce swelling of the brain or spinal cord and permanent deafness.

Quickly, Hilleman took several swabs of 5-year-old Jeryl Lynn’s throat, immersed the cotton tips in beef broth, and raced to his laboratory at Merck & Co. to put the container in the freezer. Within 4 years, Hilleman would turn his daughter’s strain of the mumps into the first-ever live vaccine for the infection, still used today in Merck’s Measles-Mumps-Rubella (MMR) vaccine.

What has worked for you to transform reluctant researchers into advocates for media outreach?

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