Pseudo-positioning
If you have a ‘scientific communications platform’ but you don’t have a positioning, you have a positioning.
If you have a brand name, or a brand colour, but you don’t have a positioning, you have a positioning.
It is entirely possible that you have a positioning, but that it isn’t very good. The presence or absence of ‘a positioning’ is not the key question - it is whether it is good.
In the case of the now ubiquitous ‘scientific communication platform’, there is a view that it is OK to start saying ‘stuff’, or even to have animated videos of your drug doing ‘stuff’, because it is scientific, and therefore must be true, and couldn’t possibly limit anyone’s perception of your drug. Unfortunately, on the way to deriving the message hierarchy, or even a list of ‘key’ messages, someone has to decide what ‘key’ means.
Why would a message be ‘key’, or a headline? It is because it is central to a narrative. So, two scenarios are possible: you will set a scientific narrative running, and then later you will have a new ‘positioning’-based narrative, and the two will co-exist; or, you will set your scientific narrative running and then change it to a new one when the positioning is set. In the first, your competing narratives will compete for attention, and distract both internally and externally. In the second, you will be trying to change or reverse a perception that you yourself created.
On the way to developing a scientific communication platform, you will do a positioning exercise. It might not be called that, but it will be a way that you will set the goal of the narrative, against which you will judge which mechanism of disease to describe, which mechanism of action to highlight, and to set the platform from which to communicate. Unfortunately a ‘platform from which to communicate’ is a positioning. If it is done simply to establish a publication plan, there is a good chance that it will be underdone - less to persuade than to generate more papers. The only place message should precede mission is in a dictionary. A communication strategy should follow the overall product strategy, positioning forming the platform from which to gauge the individual needs of the drug.
[An aside here: there has been a terrible idea spread across the industry that positioning can be ‘premise, promise, proof’, or some version of that. It is not just a wrongheaded idea, but a dangerous one. Positioning does not make a promise. It does not assert. Suggesting that you have ‘proof’ for your ‘promise’ turns positioning into a statement of fact today, instead of a way to help your customer see your value, over time. It diminishes the value of positioning to a repackaging of data that have already been collected: a passive positioning at best, a facile narrative at worst.]
On the way to developing a brandname, you will do a positioning exercise. It might not seem that way, as they might just ask you whether you want your brand to suggest ‘power’ or ‘freedom’, ‘independence’ or ‘calm’. They will ask you to do that so that you can then score the names you see against those fundamental ideas. Unfortunately, the fundamental idea of your product is the basis of its positioning. If it is done simply as a stepping stone to a brand-name, there is a good chance that it will be underdone - as something that doesn't matter too much, because the legal part is where the hard work comes in.
Many positionings end up being the result either of something that was chosen earlier without realising it (indication selection is another classic pseudo-positioning exercise), or they’re campaign focused. There is even a risk that your market research will limit your positioning, if you only look in one place with one customer group. All the research in the world on depression could never have yielded the opportunity in pain that Cymbalta saw.
These throwaway positionings are the positionings that are not ‘good’, even though they live on in PowerPoint slides. Instead, positioning done properly forms a core architecture for everything that comes later - not just in communication (why do we want to shape a market, what do they need to know that is disproportionately helpful to us?), but in clinical development, regulatory (label claim wording) and more. It is a strategic activity, not a tactical one. And, like all strategic activities with downstream impact, the whole downstream needs to be considered, not just the next phase of a project.