Storytelling In A New Era For Life Sciences
By: Emily Thomas, Managing Director Health & Wellbeing, Brands2Life
Who in the life sciences has not seen an innovative technology fail to take off?
Science and technology breakthroughs have the potential to solve some of the world’s biggest health challenges. But for an innovation to fully deliver the benefits to society that it promises, it needs to have memorability and impact.
This means capturing attention quickly, landing a strong message about the benefits it can deliver and giving decision makers an obvious reason for consideration.
Challenges of the new era
As we enter a new era of digital communications where content overload and dwindling attention spans are common barriers, gaining impact is increasingly challenging.
Reframing how we tell stories through simplicity is key; to both outsmart the competition and make it easier for people to digest information. Over the years of working with life science leaders, important storytelling lessons have emerged:
Get to the point faster. Science often brings complexity with the risk that too much detail dwarfs the story. Save the mental energy of your audience and select the information that gets to the heart of the matter more quickly. Scrutinise the key elements and limit to ‘What is it, how does it work and why should we care’.
Provide bite-sized headlines and concise summary sub-headers. Scan reading is now the norm, so headlines and headers need to do far more than just capture attention. Succinct sub-headers which meaningfully summarise the text strengthen the brain’s neural connections aiding story understanding.
Build complexity in layers. Help your audience see the big picture first and layer the detail. Visualising the message helps you to breakdown the story into parts.
Use simple language. The more complex the topic, the simpler the words and the shorter the sentence you should use. Vivid, relatable language and short sentences make science understandable and more memorable.
Choose recognisable metaphors. Our brains process the world in metaphors so create mental shortcuts with analogies and metaphors that make the complex more concrete. Here’s a good example from a medical journal to describe mRNA vaccines: “an analogy to mRNAs is a post-it note. Once the post-it note is used, it will be shredded or discarded. An mRNA vaccine operates the same way.”
Share stories to support data. Data provides information, but stories reach the heart and help to connect humans to humans, not just products to customers. People engage with stories so adding personal experience and case studies will maintain your readers’ attention and build relatability and understanding.
To summarise, in a sector where decision makers are under pressure, simplicity in storytelling is a powerful tool for cutting through in digital. By capturing and holding attention, you could ensure that an important innovation – rather than being lost through poor storytelling – could break through to benefit society.