Presentation Planning and Media Relations for the Pharmaceutical Industry

John Lidstone

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351773133
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Comunicación empresarial

This title was first published in 2003. Presenting information is a vital part of the job of both the medical director and other senior executives in the pharmaceutical industry, and yet the majority receive no training for this. Presentations have to be made internally to colleagues, clinical staff, marketing and product managers and medical sales representatives; and externally to professional medical specialists and NHS staff, the media and the general public. Anyone who manages or communicates adverse news needs to do so quickly and effectively, and be prepared to face difficult questions under media scrutiny. In this book, John Lidstone, an author acknowledged by the industry as an expert in marketing and presentation skills, provides readers with the tools and skills to make their presentations and media dealings a success. The book is divided into two parts.

PART I
Preparing and Delivering Formal Presentations

Introduction to Part I

The brain is a wonderful organ; it starts working the moment you wake in the morning and doesn't stop until you get up to make your first speech.

All of us during our passage through life find ourselves, willingly or unwillingly, on our feet in front of an audience making a speech of one sort or another. Just consider your own experiences so far. At school, for instance, you may have been cast in an end-of-term play or as head boy or head girl, had to say, 'Thank you on behalf of the whole school' to some local or national celebrity invited to present the prizes. Or at university, fancying yourself as a budding politician, you join the debating society only to discover that contributions are limited to five minutes, unaided by reference to notes!

You apply for your first job. It sounds like the opportunity of a lifetime, until you find to your horror that the recruitment process involves making a ten-minute presentation before a selection panel on a subject of their choice, followed by a question and answer session on your talk! Then, in your business, professional and social life, you find that the number of times you have to talk to small and large groups of colleagues, or to a formal audience, are legion. It may be that at the end of your induction programme, you are asked to present your thoughts and criticisms about your first three months in the company, hospital, or group practice; or you become a manager in a pharmaceutical company, so you cannot avoid addressing meetings of your staff, or talking to outside bodies which may range from groups of patients to pharmacists and even trade union gatherings. In private life the human motivations that drive you and which must be satisfied - for example, status, vanity, exhibitionism or an unquenchable desire to change the way the world is run - lead you to join a local political, charitable or professional association, union or club(s). Joining, taking part or holding office in any one of these groups exposes you to the danger or opportunity of speaking in public and either making a fool of yourself whenever you open your mouth or, by dint of advice or having a source of practical guidance, making one or a number of memorable speeches that everyone applauds and may even be quoted later.

The aim of Part I of this book is to help you to achieve this challenging but satisfying ambition. It has been designed to help you understand the communication problems you face and must plan to overcome every time you speak to a group of people; then to tell and show you, by means of text and examples, how to prepare an effective presentation. To achieve these objectives, the material has been arranged in the following sequence:

• (1) The factors you should bear in mind about human communications and the way people learn
• (2) The techniques and methods which, when used in the ways illustrated, enable you to prepare an effective presentation, speech or talk
• (3) With examples, ways of developing your skills in actually making effective presentations.

Because visual aids, skilfully used, can give added impact to a speech or presentation, Chapter 6 is devoted entirely to visual aids; how to use them, the relative advantages and disadvantages of each, dos and don'ts and a summary of the basic rules. As one who has for more than forty years given an average of a hundred speeches and presentations in the course of any single year and in all parts of the world, I have two things to add.

First, I am still nervous in those last few minutes before I get to my feet and speak. The day I stop feeling nervous, I shall give up public speaking. Why? Because that tingle of apprehension, those last-minute butterflies in the stomach which most of us experience, are signs that we care about what our audience thinks and feels, and how it will receive what we say. Above all, shall we satisfy our audience? For if we do not do that, we shall have failed.

Secondly, speaking in public for the first time is rather like a course in physical fitness hell at the beginning, but enjoyable once you get into practice and do it often enough. Now turn over the pages and discover the secrets of success. There are not too many, but you need to grapple them to your soul with hoops of steel.

CHAPTER 1
Learning and Communication

The problem with human communications is that no one thinks there is a problem! Whether we are talking to one person or to a group, we all too often think that they not only hear what we say, but understand, agree with, and will act upon what they have heard in exactly the way we believe they should. That this rarely, if ever, happens is one of the most salutary lessons you must learn about communications.

Communication objectives

How does learning take place? The learning process depends on our communication mechanisms, so the problem of learning - whether it be mastering the technicalities of a new job or trying to fathom out what a politician stands for - is in essence a problem of communication. In simple terms, we communicate through the senses. Communication can be said to take place when an identical message in the mind of one person is transferred to the mind of another.

This rarely happens, for a variety of reasons that we shall explore later. Since communication is the basic ingredient affecting people's ability to learn, let us examine the objectives we seek to achieve when we communicate, the barriers that frequently prevent us from achieving these objectives and how these barriers can be overcome.

Every speaker, when considering what he or she is going to say, faces this challenge: success depends upon my ability to communicate persuasively so that I shall achieve the objective of my talk by the end of it

That objective can be one of many: to amuse, as in an after-dinner speech; to persuade the electorate to vote for you in a contest which may be in your profession or in local or national politics; to induce people to change their attitudes and their behaviour because it will benefit them to do so; to get a group of people to continue doing what they have been doing in the past, for example the sales force to carry on promoting a particularly complicated medicine, or a specialist unit in an NHS hospital to take part in a clinical trial.

To achieve your purpose, you must concentrate on five communication objectives:

• (1) to get your listeners to HEAR what you tell them (or see what you show them)
• (2) to get your listeners to UNDERSTAND what they have heard or seen
• (3) to get your listeners to AGREE with what they have heard (or even to disagree) whilst understanding what you have said or shown to them
• (4) to get your listeners to TAKE ACTION which accords with your overall objective.

You will know if you have achieved all these objectives only if you achieve the fifth and most important objective:

• (5) to get FEEDBACK from your listeners.

This is essential if you are to learn:

• whether they have heard what you said correctly
• how much of it they understood or misunderstood
• to what extent they agree or disagree with you and
• whether they intend to take the required action, take some other action, or do nothing at ail.

Consider the most powerful feedback of all - the deathly silence that greets the after-dinner speaker's funny story when no one thinks it is!

These five communication objectives may sound easy to achieve, but everyone will have his or her own tale to add to the endless catalogue of failures. Some examples are shown in Figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1 Some examples of communication failure

To show you how difficult it is to transfer an identical message from the mind of one person to the mind of another. I would like you to participate in the following test.

Its objective is to test how well you:

• (1) hear or read correctly what you hear or read
• (2) understand correctly what you have heard or read
• (3) agree or disagree with what you have heard or read
• (4) act or react to what you have heard or read

Take a plain piece of paper and on it draw four squares as follows, numbering them 1, 2, 3, 4 as shown below:

Read out each of the following four questions or, better still, ask some one else to read them out to you. After you have read or heard each of the four questions, write down your immediate response to each one in the appropriate square.

Question 1: 'You are the captain of a ship sailing due north in mid-Atlantic at a speed of 12 knots. After steaming at this speed and in this direction for 30 minutes, the captain gives the order to the engine room to alter course through 180 degrees and then to maintain the same speed on the new course for one hour. After another hour, the captain orders the engine room to change course through 180 degrees back on to the ship's original course of due north,'

Now, in the square numbered 1, write down either: the age of the captain in years or 'I don't know'.

Question 2: In the centre of the square numbered 2, draw a horizontal line thus:

_____________________________

Having done that, write down the first and last letters of your own surname at each end of the line you have drawn.

Question 3: In the square numbered 3, write down the figure 1 followed by the plus sign +, then another 1 and then an equals sign = as follows: 1 + 1 =

Then write down what you believe is the answer.

Question 4: Now for the final question, to be answered in the square numbered 4, write down your immediate reaction to the phrase: 'Paris in the spring'.

Question 1

In answer to the question about the captain of the ship most people will write down: 'I don't know'. Most English people, that is. On the other hand most continental Europeans will answer differently. They will write down their own age. The reason for this can be found in the contrasting methods by which English and other Europeans are taught. The English are taught by what are known as Aristotelian principles. Based on the writings of the Greek philosopher, Aristotle, this method involves giving the students all the background to a subject or ar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Preparing and Delivering Formal Presentations
• Part II Handling the Media
• References and Recommended Reading
• Index