Episode 65: Mastering Effective Communication in Biotech and Healthcare with Key Opinion Leader Ryan Lauth

Today's episode is all about communications—the right message at the right time to the right audiences—and showing you care.

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Hi, and welcome to Bio from the Bayou at Bio on the. I'm Carolyn Schofield, Assistant Director of Marketing and Communications for Tulane University School of Medicine. Today's guest is Ryan Louth, a former academic who is now the Chief Strategy Officer at The 180 Group, a meeting and event production company that helps the healthcare, pharmaceutical, and medical device sectors communicate more effectively with their constituents. Welcome to the show, Ryan. Oh, hi.

Thank you for having me on here, Carolyn.

So tell us about your role as Chief Strategy Officer and what The 180 Group does.

So my role is actually pretty unique. My title is Chief Strategy Officer, which is somewhat of a common title. From a business side, I'm doing a lot of the business planning. I'm constructing the strategic map for a coming year. I'm helping to make sure that we're executing that, we're hitting on our KPIs, we're doing the proper measurements. So all of that is happening, but I kind of got there because of my background in strategic communications, actually. It's just the thinking about the strategy behind it. Started developing a lot of skill sets, so it kind of naturally fell into place. But I do a lot of work actually with presenters and leaders helping to craft their messaging. So imagine you have a leader of a large pharmaceutical company who's trying to craft a message indicating what their strategy will be for the coming year. They want to make sure everybody's on the same boat. I'm the perfect person to come in and talk to them, help to craft what that message is. So I have a really long background in working with presenters. I actually was faculty at Northwestern University for 11 years, and I was head coach of the speech team there, director of public speaking. And a fun fact about me is I'm also the founder and director of the Collegiate National Championship in Public Speaking, the National Speech Championship. So that's kind of my whole life was through presentations and strategic communications and thinking about our messaging plans. And then I got into this world. And so what the 180 Group does in particular is we work specifically in the pharmaceutical medical device spaces to help make meetings that have the type of impact that people are looking for. So that might be a giant national sales meeting where you're trying to both train people and get them excited and make it impactful. It might be an ad board meeting. It might be, we did one where it was 11 people. That was it. But it was the C-suite and some extra people at the New York Stock Exchange. And we had to make this really intimate but powerful moment where they could have a really wonderful conversation and learn and think about the direction of this large pharmaceutical company. So whatever it is, we help to craft those, the messaging and the content and the execution for large productions and small productions.

One thing that we've heard of here at the BIO, on the BIO conference, is from some startups. And when somebody's maybe crafting that strategic message for the first time, what kind of tips do you give them to lock down how to get that message out?

My first thing that I always recommend is stay patient-centric. Your communication should never lose sight of the perspective. And that's both of the perspective of you are doing good and you're helping people, And that should be present throughout all the communications, especially from leadership. That's very important that they're showing that they care. The next thing is you wanna make sure that you're treating people like they're human beings, right? So that's not just the patients, but everybody in the organization is a human. They're dealing with their own things, and you have to talk to them and treat them that way. Then I like to think about this from more of a strategic perspective, and I dive into the 4 Ps for this, like classic 4 Ps of strategy. The first one of those being that perspective. So that's overarching things like beliefs, values, mission statements. And then we get into the position side. So we're clearly communicating our boundaries of what not to do so that everyone's on the same page that differentiates the company in the market. They're able to stay on the path of the company. Everybody knows what the plan is in that respect. The next one is plans, which I was tying into. So everyone understands their role in those actual action plans. Those are clearly communicated. Those expectations are set up. Great culture comes from clear expectations. And so I like to make sure that that stuff's clear. clearly articulated and communicated. And then finally is the patterns of action. So that's continually being able to communicate changes in a competitive landscape. So oftentimes your leaders in a giant organization are thought of as the communication leaders. That's not actually the case. I like to think of this as a bottom-up versus top-down type of communication plan. And it's just as important that we listen to people who are on the ground. So for example, if I'm working with a national sales leader, that person might be thinking, what's my message going to be? for this audience? We're going to launch this new product. How am I supposed to get people excited about it? And I often will say, well, how do you, how do you think that your audience is going to react? What are they seeing in the market that you are not seeing? Where are your blind spots that they have a better perspective on? What does the communication look like from the bottom going up, just like it is from the top going down? So those are the types of questions you should be asking, those 4 Ps, and then focusing ultimately on patients and people.

Now, I got to first meet you at Fierce Pharma West, and we also ran into each other at Fierce Pharma East earlier this year. And I think one of the messages that came out of both of those conferences is how important it is to have strategy when it comes to communications and to have those communicators in the room with the other expertise. And not everybody has, I guess, that side of their brain or the muscle, the communications muscle, but it's always so vital to have when you're in any kind of organization or business.

The thing I like to say is you have your business strategy and you have your communication strategy. And the communication strategy is absolutely imperative for the business strategy to work. If I have this great idea and I have 50,000 people who work in my organization, if I'm just talking to you, Carolyn, and I say, hey Carolyn, can you tell everybody to go do this thing? Like, that's just not gonna work, right? Right. You can't have one person who's communicating it to 50,000 people. So you have to think, how am I gonna get this information to point A to point B? What do my digital plans look like? What does my communication network look like? Am I using a champion model to create change? All of those things are really important. Otherwise, you have a lot of good ideas and you have a lot of good planning, but the execution of that planning becomes impossible. So the strategic communication is what gives you business execution.

What common communication challenges do you encounter when you're working with life science companies, and, and how do you help your clients overcome those barriers?

Yeah, well, I think that mostly we are dealing with a battle for attention at all times. And that's the most common challenge that people face. And that's both for people on stage and for somebody sending out a press release. It could be from sending out something on social media, right? You don't know what people are actually paying attention to. I have found, unfortunately, in a lot of even large pharmaceutical companies or medical device companies, a lot of people only read the first sentence in an email. There's so much that you have to think about when you're like crafting that messaging. So People are human. We often forget that. So we often overload our audiences rather than meeting them where they are. So I like to create messaging for events and for leaders that really sticks out and is memorable, right? So I think this is something you've talked about before. We coin it storymaking, and I like to call it though the water cooler narrative. So if we're crafting a message for, say, a leader or CEO on stage, I want people to A week later when they're in their office space or they have a few extra minutes on a Teams call and they're trying to connect with somebody, they're like, hey, do you remember what Carolyn said the other day? Oh my gosh, the story she said about her family was so powerful, right? Or I just, I honestly felt like she cared about what we were doing. And so when people are talking about the messaging that you're saying, you are getting a whole extra lifecycle. to your communication. And that's how you really develop culture within an organization. It's from the stories that people tell amongst themselves. So what I like to do is help to craft those stories in a unique way that allows that life to continue in the way we want it to. So being very strategic with the narrative itself. So that's, I think, how I would kind of grab everybody's attention there.

When it comes to having messages and you're crafting your messages, Should it be a one-size-fits-all approach to communications? Is there a blanket statement for everything, or should you be identifying different audiences from stakeholders to investors, healthcare professionals, whether it's patients?

Knowing the audience is obviously paramount in any type of communication plan that you have. So yes, you should know specific audiences as much as you can, but at a certain point you want to be cautious in putting too much in The belief that certain demographics, for example, will appreciate an audience in the same way. In the end, every human being is unique and you never know quite what you're going to get. So the best thing I can recommend is listening really well and knowing who the people are and asking a lot of questions. And as you're creating a communication plan, having a good team of people who understands a broad range of perspectives, because then they can call you out on those blind spots that you have as you're communicating. So the big worry when you're communicating to just like a big mix of people is that you'll have detractors in your audience. And so you'll say something like, I don't know, everybody's going to come back to the office. We're not going to work from home anymore. And you know that there's going to be some people who are going to be aggressively against that, right? But how do they need to have that message put in front of them to where they can buy into it and be okay with it and understand it? This is where I think also I want to tie back to that patient-centric messaging again. So much stuff in the healthcare space becomes so much easier when everybody's speaking about it in the right way. And that means showing they actually care about patients. And it doesn't exist everywhere. I work with a lot of different organizations and some do this really, really well and some don't do it very well. The ones that do it really, really well, all sorts of change like that, all the crafting of messaging, the challenging communications, those suddenly become so much easier because everybody understands the value of the organization and they're all on board with that. So that's Kind of my, my thinking on tailoring messages. Go for it, tailor it, but be careful on tailoring it too much as well, because in the end you have a job to do and you can't make every single person happy.

Something you've mentioned before is the 180 Group always tries to bring the wow factor to whatever event you're doing. And talk about what a difference bringing the wow factor makes in any kind of event planning or even communication strategy.

Yeah. Wow factor. I like to think of as experience design, right? So when you are having a big, powerful moment for an audience or a group, they are much more likely to retain the information that you've given them. So we live in this world where we're constantly spread thin. We've already kind of talked about that. But when you have those things that become memorable, then you're much more likely to have your actions take place. So if you're trying to do too much, it's not going to work. But tying a specific individualized event or experience to an emotion makes it much more likely people will retain it 6 months, a year, 2 years down the road. So I like to think of this as we're crafting, like, as leaders talk to other leaders about how to be good leaders, right? When that's happening, I'm often coaching them to give those best tips, but to do it in a way that's really simple, really easy to understand, especially in stressful situations. Right. So I was on stage for one pharma company a few weeks ago talking to them about culture and leadership, for example. And the way I was designing my messaging was intentionally experiential and designed to make them stand up, do stuff, be engaging. We co-produced a song together live. It was pretty wild. I have a beatboxer on stage. We did martial arts demonstrations. It was just wild. But they will remember the specific messages that were tied to each of those little activations or experiences. They're not going to remember everything I said over the course of an hour and a half, but they will remember the 5 things that I needed them to remember. So when times are tough and they're dealing with really stressful stuff, because this is a group of people that legitimately deal with incredibly stressful stuff, when they're in that moment, what do they still retain from that message from 2 years ago? And that's what ultimately allows them to be more impactful in their job. So I like to think of creating experiences that create retention and memorable moments.

When it comes to life sciences, from my perspective, it's pretty easy to find those impactful stories. And I think what we do kind of lends itself to finding those stories. It's just a matter of getting out there and kind of looking for the different stories. Have you found that in your experiences, that the stories are there, they're just waiting to be crafted and told?

Often, yeah, especially established organizations, for sure, the stories are there. There's a reason those products exist. They're helping people. They're solving ailments. They're making people feel better. They're saving lives. They're improving lives. So those stories exist and those things are really easy to tie back to in some ways, right? There's obviously challenges when you're talking about patients and advocacy groups and there's a lot of things about what stories can you tell, where's the privacy involved. So you have to be a little careful on that. But yeah, those stories are often there. I think the biggest challenge is actually for early stage, like incredibly early stage. Folks who haven't actually put their work into action anymore. So they're having to work in hypotheticals. But I, I would say, like, as long as the audience knows that it's a hypothetical, that's a totally fine thing to do. Like, imagine a world where— and then setting that up for people so they can see the journey of a potential patient. And that makes it much easier to understand the science behind it as well.

And it also goes back to recognizing everybody as a human being because Even the people working on these hypotheticals or working on these basic science things, they have stories that they're bringing into the table. They've got family members who maybe had this disease, or I talked to somebody yesterday who had type 1 diabetes, and that's why they're working in the space now. So those stories are there. It's just a matter of finding them.

Yeah, for sure. I talked to some people last night as well that have really personal stories about it. It's one of those things where It's wonderful to talk to those people and connect and empathize and sympathize in some ways, and to be able to share your own stories. And that's what's beautiful about a community of healthcare people is we often all have our own stories. The challenge, of course, with that type of storytelling is that there's inevitably an emotional labor that goes into it that takes an impact on both the people giving that story and the people hearing the story. So when a larger organization is just telling those stories that are sad and powerful, Even inspiring, if you're doing too much of that, it actually becomes draining and you lose sight of the kind of little picture as well. So I've had it happen myself, right? Well, I'll be on stage, I'll be communicating to people and giving a talk or something, and I'll go into a personal story and I will get emotionally impacted. This actually happened a week and a half ago. I got so emotionally impacted on stage that I messed up my next few lines of what I was going to go into. So there is a risk in that, like we can lose track of the overall message and the messaging plan if we get too emotionally caught up in it. But I still think that's worth getting emotionally caught up in it, right? Because then everybody's on the same page. They're again, that communication plan of change management becomes so much easier and people feel good when they feel like they're doing good. And I love that. That's my favorite thing about healthcare.

We've always heard about storytelling, and as a former news reporter, I kind of know that aspect of it. But now on the public relations and the communications side, It's more storymaking. Talk about the difference between the two and kind of what storymaking is.

I think storymaking ties so well into experience design, like I said before. I love helping leaders, especially in pharma medical device, to rethink the way they can present their information because of storymaking. So one example of it that I have is I worked with a leader at a large pharma company who really wanted to connect with his people and didn't know how to do that. He was new to the organization. He felt like there was this kind of gap between them. He thought people would were intimidated by him. So I had him start this whole story about his grandmother and about how his children love his grandmother, told some funny stories about his kids, and told the types of stories that other people are going to want to come up to him later at their event and talk to him about it. Like, oh, my son does that too. Or, oh, when my kid went to college, he had the same problem. Or, oh, my grandmother had this funny phrase just like she did. That's amazing. And so then it was creating these moments of connection. So you're actually creating moments later where people are effectively retelling the stories with you. So that was one really cool one. One that I'm really looking forward to doing is one I'm actually working on right now with a leader in a medical device company. And he's a national sales leader, and he has one of his sales reps who was undefeated last year, right? That's the way he described it, as undefeated, right? Like against the competition, won every single time. And last year we had him give out a WWE belt to this guy, right, on stage to show the excitement. Also keep in mind, they're talking genuinely about patients and the impact they can make on lives. You can't do this sort of stuff unless you're doing that because it can overshadow it. So you have to know how to do both well, right? But anyway, so he's coming in and this year we're trying to top that. So what we're actually having happen is when he gets to that part, he's like, hey, sales rep who's still undefeated a year later, we can't find competition that can beat you. So I brought somebody in and he's gonna bring out a professional wrestler. Who I happen to know, who's gonna come out from backstage when he's in his full leotard and everything and be yelling, I'm gonna get you, right? And they're gonna go up on stage doing arm wrestling competition with all the lights and sound and music in the room. They're gonna award another belt. The professional wrestler, spoiler alert to anybody who's about to see this. Oh my gosh. Spoiler alert, professional wrestler loses, right? And it's enormous man. And it's gonna be a fantastic time. But what's gonna happen is everybody's gonna talk about that moment. And about what it felt like to be that person who won over and over and over again. And so that story is going to live and be a part of the culture of them having this fun, engaging atmosphere where their leader is somebody who's human and they can talk to and they connect with. And they'll be able to see him 5 years from now and be like, remember when you did that? And he'll be like, yeah, I do. And it's immediately breaking down those barriers that act as kind of the walls of communication between leadership and everybody else.

This is a totally random question, not on the thing at all, but because we live in a capitalist society, um, you know, success is, is usually measured by the bottom line or how many more customers you get or your reach. But for you, Ryan, what does success look like? What do you define as a successful event or an successful thing that you did?

Well, there's 2 sides to it, right? So from the business side, Did the event help them to accomplish their business strategy? Right? When we look back at it six months, a year later, did everything that needed to be communicated get communicated? Did the overall messaging behind the event land? Did it get people inspired in the right ways? Are they understanding things the right ways? So there's all of that. The bigger side for me personally, what I I love to just individually bring to when I'm crafting messaging and working with leaders or working on these events. Is I really want to help people to show that they care, right? So for me, caring was a bit of a superpower for me as a younger person. And it seems so fluffy often to talk about it, especially in a healthcare space. But obviously caring seems like it should be important, but we often forget about that. And I just think it's really, really important that leaders in these giant organizations or smaller, show that they care. And if they can do that well, it changes the entire narrative behind what's happening in healthcare today. Because currently we're facing a world where there's lots and lots of people who are just in this for the most powerful reasons. It's the family members that they love. It's the people they connect to. And they're overshadowed by people saying these companies are only in it for profit. And it's because leaders aren't courageous enough often to just go out and be like, hey, no, I genuinely care about helping people. And when we get more people doing that, people will eventually buy into it. I saw a really great bit of information at one of the conferences that we went at, which was also talking about the bottom line for companies, right? And how stock values go up when your brand value goes up and your brand value goes up when your employees care about your company. And the best way to do that is to care about the people, from the patients to the employees, everybody along the way. And so it's business sense, but it's also human sense, and it feels good. So I just wanna help people to show that they care, to be able to do it in a way to where they still accomplish their business goals, and then ultimately to feel really good about the direction they're going as an organization.

Well, thank you so much for talking with me, Ryan. I really appreciate this conversation. We'd love to have you back on Bio from the Bayou in the future to talk with us some more. And thanks for being here at Bio on the Bayou.

Thank you, and I really applaud you for getting that right.

And as always, we'll have Ryan's contact information and informational links posted in our show notes. Make sure you check them out to learn more about Ryan and the 180 Group. Thanks again for joining us.

You're welcome.

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