Crafting high-impact messages to educate a multi-stakeholder audience about a little-known disease
Industry:
Pharmaceuticals and Biotech
Offering:
Disease awareness, Product Communications
Challenge
Aquinox Pharmaceuticals was pivoting from an IR focus to engaging multiple stakeholders as it entered Phase 3 trials in interstitial cystitis/bladder pain syndrome (IC/BPS), a misunderstood condition with no new medications in 20+ years. It needed to develop key messages and a messaging hierarchy to tell an impactful corporate and scientific story.
Approach
Discover
We began by conducting in-depth interviews with leadership to understand their corporate goals, near-term strategy, vision for the future and key audiences.
We reviewed corporate communications content to assess the use of messages and their impact. We also conducted a media coverage analysis to determine which messages appeared most frequently and the gaps between the story the company wanted to tell and what was being published.
Develop
- With these insights in hand, we hosted a cross-functional workshop with leadership to align on company positioning, messaging needs and key themes to communicate about its mission and commitment, therapeutic focus, product/science, patient need/market opportunity and pipeline. As part of this exercise, tension points associated with each theme were explored to align the team on areas to emphasize.
- We drafted a key message document including top-line messages, sub-messages and proof points. We finalized these messages in a second cross-functional workshop in which we also aligned on goals for stakeholder-specific messages for patients, investors, clinicians and regulators. A message playbook with priority messages for each stakeholder group was developed following the workshop.
Deploy
- The message playbook was distributed to all leadership and individuals responsible for developing content. We led briefings with agency partners to ensure all parties had the messages they needed to develop impactful and aligned content.
Results
Aquinox gained a suite of message materials to support aligned, impactful and on-message communications across all materials, including press releases, corporate presentation, a new website and disease awareness activities. The materials cut down on the time required to develop and review new content, since company leaders had previously aligned on the message priorities and language.
Using consistent messages across content enhanced stakeholder understanding of what Aquinox stood for and its unique science/product.
