Making and shaping the headlines

pharmafile | March 15, 2006 | Feature | Medical Communications |   

Most companies are anxious to court the media to ensure a clearer understanding of their business focus. However, the first time many companies meet the press is when a crisis occurs.

In both cases it is highly desirable that senior executives should be aware of the best way to react to media enquiries in order to maximise the opportunities, or limit the damage, as the occasion requires.

Here are just a few of the headlines relating to pharma and biotech companies over the past three months.

London, 15 February: Exanta withdrawn after liver damage to patient

Shares in AstraZeneca fell after the group said it would pull the drug from sale and halt further development work.

New Delhi, 14 February: Automobile and pharma companies are set to lose the present fiscal incentive of weighted deduction of in-house R&D expenditure from their taxable income

13 December, 2005: The Wall Street Journal: Ghost Story, a 2500-word front page story, complete with colourful charts and graphs, took a fresh swipe at the pharma industry.

Your phone rings, and quite unexpectedly a journalist is on the line asking you some tricky questions about your company's activities. How do you handle it? Your company's reputation may depend on the answers you give.

Pharma and biotech companies are always in the news, whether it be for new research, new drugs, annual results or changes in share prices. And many of them, particularly the global pharma companies have well defined policies for dealing with media enquiries.

It is probably fair to say that at the end of the 1990s pharma executives did not give many interviews. Information was considered proprietary and the industry leaders, by and large, kept a low profile. And as long as stocks performed well, investors were happy to leave it that way. In the US when President Clinton initiated healthcare reform, the drug companies became more defensive in their positioning.

Proactive stance

Following that, many companies decided to take a more proactive stance, explaining the high cost of prescription drugs and connecting it to R&D investment. The trade group PhRMA, representing the country's leading pharma manufacturing and biotech companies, also got involved at an industry level, and you can still see the results of that today. The website even has an online reporters' handbook explaining the association's view on a myriad of industry related topics.

Media training

In this environment, one company had all its media training conducted by in-house communications counsel. It was fortunate in that a number of the department came to work there from the media, so they were well versed in what reporters required. Most of the senior executives were good communicators, both internally and externally, so they did not require a lot of training.

They handled interviews with ease, and took the advice of the in-house counsel to rehearse, stick to talking points, and always have someone from the communications team present for interviews. The communications team handled most comments and only set up executive interviews with targeted publications or TV and radio programmes.

But, for the most part, the external voice of the company was a senior management person or someone from media relations, referred to as a company spokesperson.

A visit to the Novartis corporate website shows that they have media contacts at both local and global level. The heads of businesses and their management teams have been media trained. Certain others in functional areas such as environmental and production,  those likely to be called on for comment in the event of an emergency, were also trained.

Who should be trained?

That is quite appropriate for global companies, but what of the nascent biotech companies who may not share similar resources or funding for external and internal communications?

The issues they may face can be just as serious, as one company recently found when it became the target of an aggressive attack by shareholders. Here, the chief executive took the brunt of questioning, which from a communications perspective is absolutely correct.

So what exactly is media training and who should undertake it? Dealing with the second point first: anyone in a company who is likely to be approached by the media for comment.

Firms with more than one employee should have a clearly written media policy that spells out who in the organisation may respond to media inquiries, what kinds of information can or should be released to reporters and what information must be kept confidential.

Its important to assure your employees that talking to the media and establishing good relationships with reporters can and should be constructive. Reporters need you as a source of news and background information as much as you need them to give you publicity and clarify your point of view.

It is important, however, to list by name those executives in a company who may respond to media enquiries and let them undertake a professionally structured media training day.

It is equally important that those who have not been nominated understand to which of their colleagues they should direct media calls.

Dealing with the media

Media training really grew out of crisis communications in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when there were some major oil industry incidents, as well as a couple involving the pharma industry. The leaking of toxic gases at the Union Carbide Bhopal plant and the tampering with Johnson and Johnson's painkiller Tylenol are still classic and well-documented case histories in crisis communications. Both events highlighted the need for companies to have trained spokespersons to deal with media calls.

Most media training companies rely heavily on professional journalists and broadcasters to impart their knowledge to clients, usually through coaching and a series of interviews.  These are normally videotaped, so that the person being interviewed can learn from their mistakes.

Depending on the clients requirements interviews can be either benign and conversational or aggressive and defensive, and there are different ways of preparing for print, radio or television interviews. Costs vary but are in the range of 350 for a half-days course for one person to 3,500 for an in-depth crisis communication session.

In general, there are two scenarios in which reporters contact an individual or organisation. The first is when the reporter takes the initiative. They may get information about a newsworthy issue or event that is related to the organisation. The story may be based on the company itself or an individual at the organisation. It could be an issue, emergency or crisis. It could be something interesting about the organisation that is newsworthy at that point in time, or a reporter contacting someone at the company to get their expert perspective.  

The second point of contact is when the organisation contacts reporters. A news release is issued (hopefully about something that is actually newsworthy) and reporters are encouraged to contact the organisation. In both of these examples, a case could be made that it is critical to attempt to build relationships with reporters.

With an issue, emergency, crisis or other newsworthy event, companies want the reporter to portray the issue in an accurate and fair fashion. Conversely, when the organisation contacts reporters, it is asking members of the media for assistance in conveying information and messages that will help the company in some way.

Avoid knee-jerk reactions

A cardinal rule for any interview is to avoid knee-jerk reactions (crisis communication is a different scenario and will be addressed later in this article). Give yourself time to think. Ask the reporter the thrust of their story and their deadline and tell them you will call back, but dont leave it too late. Use the time to think through what you should be putting across, particularly in response to any tricky issues that are likely to be raised. Write down a series of key points that you wish to convey. In most cases no comment is not an option.

When you make contact, again listen intently to the reporter's questions: don't start your answer before the question is finished; remember that short answers are better than long ones. A favourite device used by reporters is silence. Once you have finished answering the question you too should remain silent until the next question. This allows the interviewer to follow through with more questions.

In the introduction to his training course Media Training with Excellence: A Balanced Approach, Eric Bergman argues: "Reporters need information. They gather information and ask questions to get answers. There are endless sources to which they can turn to gather information, and many other individuals and organisations to whom they can ask questions."

Spokespeople would like to leave a positive impression, or at least reduce the likelihood of a negative one. They would like their expertise highlighted or their products showcased and would like more people to understand their organisation and support it.  

If company spokespeople allow reporters to steer the process, but focus on answering questions and stopping, they can help reporters meet their needs. This should be our starting point. From there, we should teach spokespeople to manage the process by actively matching the parts of their organisation (or their area of expertise within the organisation) with areas of interest to the reporter.  

Answer and stop!

By teaching them to answer and stop, we prevent problems. Spokespeople who say too much (and, if they are not specifically taught to stop, they probably will) run the risk of providing too much context during the interview.

This leads to complaints of being quoted out of context. If they are quoted out of context, there are two possible results: the first is the relatively harmless misquote, in which there is little damage control to conduct, but the organisation's image is not portrayed as positively as everyone would like. The second is misquotes that waste time or cause real damage to the organisation's reputation, or to that of the spokesperson.

By teaching them to answer and stop, we help spokespeople communicate more effectively. This leads to greater understanding among reporters and the audiences they reach.

There are some key generalisms for any interview, including:

Speak in headlines; offer conclusions first, briefly and directly backing them up with facts.

Asked about a problem, talk about a solution

Dont let false charges, facts or figures offered by the interviewer go uncorrected

Don't repeat a reporters negative statements. Frame your reply as a positive statement.  

Avoid jargon and industry-speak

Be engaging and likeable

If you dont know the answer, dont fake it. If appropriate, assure the reporter you will find an answer before his or her deadline.

Do not speculate. Answer only within the area of your expertise

Never lie to a reporter

Dealing with a crisis

At a recent communications industry conference on dealing with crises the overall theme that kept coming through was the need to prepare scenarios, as companies do when developing risk management strategies. In my oil industry days we not only had crisis communications plans, but also practised them at regular intervals with different scenarios and reporters.

Where crisis is concerned, companies should put communications at the heart of the planning process and be as open as possible, as quickly as possible. With any major incident, it is usually the broadcasters who initially set the agenda; so don't only think press relations.

There is always a temptation not to comment until you have all the facts, but as a senior TV news executive recently put it, the worst thing you can do is to allow a vacuum to be created. Journalists, working on what they can glean, will fill it.

This means you need to have someone (it needn't be the chief executive) who can almost immediately explain what is known about the situation, and what the organisation is doing about it. So the company sets the agenda rather than allowing others to do so. The worst thing you can do is to duck beneath the parapet and hope that the crisis will dissolve.

Most companies hugely underestimate the resource needed to man the phones if something happens. Bring in whatever help you can, including external public relations consultants, as early as possible, making sure they are briefed on the situation as it develops and provided with likely questions and the company's answers.

Remember the range of stakeholders with whom you must communicate: employees, shareholders, customers, distributors and local regulatory authorities if need be. If appropriate, ensure the communications department can publish the latest information on the company website  for instance to answer customers likely questions, making sure the link is immediately visible from the front page.

And finally, have trained spokespeople ready with plenty of backups, cool heads, providing a human face for the company. They can explain what steps it is taking, and if appropriate praise those such as the emergency services who have been doing a fantastic job, express sympathy for the bereaved, or reassure customers that the service will continue unaffected. 

Ian Hawkins is a Fellow of the International Association of Business Communicators  (IABC) and independent business communications consultant.

Eric Bergman is accredited by IABC and specialises in media and presentation training.