In the third episode of Pharma Decrypted, host Sabine Louët, founder of SciencePOD, was joined by Laura Kennedy, a marketing excellence and brand lead with decades of experience across the pharmaceutical industry. Kennedy, who is co-author of the forthcoming book We Don’t Sell Soap, made the case for why pharma teams need to return to marketing fundamentals and build a brand narrative before they think about execution.
Here are the key takeaways from the conversation.
Pharma marketing has an impact problem
Despite significant investment in omnichannel and digital transformation over the past several years, healthcare marketing still isn’t delivering consistent impact. That was the starting point for the conversation and the motivation behind Kennedy’s book.
The root cause, as Kennedy sees it, is that too many teams are activity-focused. They produce more content, run more tactics, and chase more KPIs without a clear understanding of what is actually driving results. When sales targets aren’t met, the instinct is to do more of the same rather than to step back and question whether the approach itself is sound.
Kennedy and her co-author Claudia Adreani have spent a combined forty years working alongside pharma marketing teams. Their observation is that the industry needs a shift from activity-based marketing to insights and impact-based marketing.
The book sets out six core fundamentals, a framework they call the Bridge Framework, that sit above any individual company’s planning templates and apply to any pharma marketing context.
Understand your customer before you do anything else
The Bridge Framework covers six areas: mapping the market, deep customer understanding, strategic choices, the brand narrative, guided experiences, and measuring for impact. Kennedy chose to focus the conversation on the two that underpin everything else: customer understanding and brand narrative.
Deep customer understanding goes well beyond survey data. Surveys tell you part of the picture, but a customer is unlikely to hand you the insight that transforms your brand strategy. Instead, teams need to bring together all available data, field intelligence, assumptions, and sentiment, and make sense of it collectively.
Kennedy recommended frameworks to examine not only what customers are doing but why, at a functional, social, emotional, and contextual level. The goal is to understand what it actually feels like to be that customer. That depth of understanding becomes the anchor for every strategic decision that follows.
Practically, this means protecting time in the planning calendar for the cross-functional team to examine the patient journey together, map the stakeholders who intersect it, and build a shared picture of the target segments. It cannot be rushed, and it cannot be outsourced.
Your brand needs a narrative, not just a set of claims
Human beings are wired to respond to stories. They are not wired to remember disconnected facts and figures. Yet pharma marketing has traditionally relied on exactly that: a sequence of clinical claims presented in a predictable order of efficacy, safety, and ease of use.
Kennedy argued that a brand narrative puts the customer at the centre of the story. Using the language of storytelling, the customer is the protagonist, their pain points are the antagonist, and the brand is the guide that helps the hero overcome those challenges. The narrative presents the possibility of a better future, whether the challenge is simple or complex.
She pointed to the brand Dove as a consumer example of how a brand narrative built on genuine customer insight can endure for decades. In the 1990s, Unilever identified that women felt alienated by the beauty industry’s narrow standards. The “real beauty” narrative addressed a universal truth, and it has remained the brand’s foundation ever since. The product itself is straightforward, but the narrative elevated it beyond its functional attributes.
For pharma, the inputs required before developing a narrative are clear: a defined target customer, a positioning that addresses contextual needs beyond the purely clinical, and a clear understanding of the behavioural shift you are trying to achieve.
Kennedy described this as the “A to B shift”: knowing what the customer is doing today and what you need them to be doing tomorrow.
Own your narrative as a team
One of Kennedy’s strongest points was that the brand narrative must be developed and owned by the internal team, not handed to an agency.
In the context of omnichannel, this is more important than ever. Omnichannel planning is designed to be iterative. Teams need to understand the narrative deeply enough to recognise when it is working, when it isn’t, and what needs adjusting. If the narrative was developed externally, that iterative capability is lost.
Kennedy acknowledged that bringing in external support to facilitate the process can be valuable, particularly for teams doing it for the first time. But the thinking and the ownership must remain internal. Every cross-functional team member, not just marketing, needs to be familiar with the narrative and the strategic assets that support it.
AI can help you scale, but it cannot replace the thinking
When asked about AI’s role, Kennedy noted: AI has a contribution across the entire planning process: developing insight, segmenting the market, drafting positioning statements, and generating iterations of a brand narrative as a starting point for discussion.
Where AI adds the most value in execution is in delivering the narrative consistently across touchpoints at scale. Consistency matters because customers need time to absorb a story. A narrative that shifts with every interaction fails to build the recognition and trust that drive behavioural change.
However, Kennedy and Louët were aligned on the limits. Content that cannot be distinguished from unedited AI output is, as Louët put it, competing in a market of diminishing returns.
Pharma teams are beginning to recognise this and are shifting towards fewer but more polished digital assets: longer KOL videos with genuine insight, more considered infographics, content that rewards the time a healthcare professional spends engaging with it.
Start simple and resist the urge to over-personalise
On the question of segmentation and personalisation, Kennedy’s advice was pragmatic: start simple.
The level of segmentation you should use depends on the drug’s life cycle and the business challenge. A launch product might warrant three or four individualised customer journeys. A more mature product might focus on the single segment most likely to drive growth. The complexity of managing multiple journeys with different channel preferences can build rapidly, and sixty-four different customer journeys serve no one well.
Kennedy’s priority was relevance over sophistication. Identify the segment, understand what they are struggling with, and ensure the customer journey is relevant enough to move them through the adoption path. Channels and timing can be optimised later. Getting the content and the relevance right is the foundation that everything else builds upon.
Q&A: New brand managers need fundamentals, not just templates
The final question from the audience asked about the most common mistake new brand and product managers make. Kennedy’s answer was direct: many enter the role without formal marketing training.
The typical path in pharma sees someone promoted from a sales role into brand management, where they learn by observing a manager who may also lack formal training. If the prevailing culture is activity-based, the new brand manager absorbs those habits and perpetuates the cycle.
Kennedy’s advice to new brand managers was to educate themselves on the fundamentals, to question the norm, and not to assume that the way things have always been done is the optimal way. She also noted that colleagues who join from consumer marketing or media backgrounds bring perspectives that can be transformative, though the pace of change in pharma often frustrates them enough to leave.
Key Takeaways
- Stop doing more and start doing better. Activity-based marketing produces volume without guaranteed impact. Shift to an insights- and impact-based approach built on marketing fundamentals.
- Go deep on customer understanding. Surveys are part of the picture, not the whole picture. Use frameworks like “jobs to be done” to understand customer behaviour at a functional, social, emotional, and contextual level.
- Build a brand narrative, not a list of claims. Put the customer at the centre of the story. The brand is the guide, not the hero. A strong narrative outlasts any individual tactic.
- Own the narrative internally. The cross-functional team must develop and understand the narrative themselves. In an iterative omnichannel environment, outsourcing this thinking removes your ability to adapt.
- Use AI to scale, not to think. AI can help generate iterations and deliver consistency across touchpoints, but unedited AI output erodes trust. Fewer, more polished assets outperform high-volume, low-quality content.
- Start simple with segmentation. Prioritise relevance over personalisation complexity. Get the content and the customer journey right before optimising channels.
- Invest in fundamentals for new marketers. Without formal training, brand managers default to the habits around them. Questioning the status quo is the only way to break the cycle.
The views expressed in this interview are the speaker’s own.
Interview conducted by Sabine Louët. Edited from the interview transcript for clarity and length.