This is Part 3 of the ‘Succeeding in Value Communication’ series, a set of articles that examine the key success factors in creating customer engagement tools that successfully communicate the clinical and economic benefits of pharmaceuticals, devices and diagnostics. These recommendations have been drawn from the experiences of the BaseCase Consulting Team.
A single value story should be highly adaptable
Storytelling is both an art and a science. The best storytellers engage the audience on both the intellectual and the aesthetic level, being charming and convincing at the same time.
When communicating your Value Story, the same principles should be employed. HEOR data and the claims they support are often dry and very academic. And so, it’s important to present your information in a visual and attractive way. It’s a common misconception that aesthetics mean nothing and data means everything. It’s often actually supposedly little things like this that make the difference between a good value story and a memorable value story!
Instead of spreadsheets and paragraphs of text, the best instances of value communication that we have seen use dynamic charts, infographics, and simple yet impactful visualizations.
Putting the art aside, there is also a science. Not only do studies show an average adult’s attention span drops off after around 10 minutes, but payers and healthcare providers (HCPs) can often not spare much longer than this for a meeting with your KAMs and field teams.
Within such a short timeframe, it’s impossible to tell an effective value story in a linear fashion that gives equal weight to each point. But so often, people try to do this. It’s important to remember that not all elements are of equal importance to a particular payer or HCP, and this should be reflected in the structure of your value story.
This is where the principle of layering comes in. It is the process of structuring your story in a logical and rational way, with the most relevant points for your current audience forming the backbone of the story.
The graphic above outlines the difference between a Linear Story and a Layered Story. The Top Layer indicates the key elements of your value story. More detailed information is available on Sub Layer 1 and Sub Layer 2, with markers indicating where it is available. If needed, you are able to move to the deeper layers of information to provide further evidence or credibility without interrupting the flow of the story.
Using a BaseCase app as an example, these sub layers can take the form of pop-ups or ‘background pages’, where you can place supporting information to supplement the main value story. These are readily available and only displayed if needed. This makes the structure of your value story highly adaptable.
Layering your presentations means meetings can be shorter and more tailored to audience needs. But this does require an active storyboarding process to decide how information should be divided between different layers. Therefore, this does place greater emphasis on refining your high-level value story before proceeding with implementing your presentation. This is some we discussed in the previous blog.
This is also linked to the next, and final, stage of succeeding in value communication. Here, you will need to test and have end users evaluate your presentation before committing to a full-scale roll out.
