Why, not what: The case for value-driven science communication

Last week I sat in the audience at a marketing summit, listening to a panel of science communicators and marketers talk about a question that eventually comes up in every life sciences organisation: how do you get scientists to be better communicators?

I did not go into that room planning to say anything. But partway through, the discussion turned to why scientists resist communicating their own work, and I found myself raising my hand to describe my career pivot from bench chemistry to application science and technical sales.

The gap isn't vocabulary

The easy explanation for why scientists and marketers struggle to work together is that they speak different languages. But this is wrong, and one of the panellists explained why. Vocabulary is not the barrier. A scientist and a marketer can sit down, define every acronym, and still fail to communicate, because the mismatch is not in the words. It is in what each discipline has been trained to lead with.

Scientists are trained to report the ‘what’. A PhD trains you to describe your method, data, and conclusions with precision, and to withhold judgment about significance until you have the evidence to support it. Peer review is a check against overclaiming. You learn to be exhaustive and exact, and to let the data speak for itself.

Marketing and sales require something close to the opposite instinct. They require leading with the ‘why’. Why does this matter to this audience, at this moment? Why should they care? That is not a less rigorous form of communication, but it can feel like one to a scientist because it asks you to make a claim about significance before the data fully supports it. It can feel, uncomfortably, like the thing science teaches you not to do.

What changed for me

When I moved from bench chemistry into application science and then into technical sales, the shift that mattered was not learning new terminology. It was learning to talk about why something mattered and the value it created, instead of jumping straight into the technical detail. Scientists are trained to talk about the details. Customers need to know whether this is relevant to their problem. The impact answers that. The details of how it works come later.

The second thing I had to get comfortable with was ambiguity. In a scientific paper, a claim comes with its conditions attached. In marketing, a claim must often stand on its own, and somewhere in your head, you are cataloguing every scenario in which it would not quite apply. Learning to let that claim stand while remaining professionally honest about it was a significant adjustment. It is not that marketing lacks discipline. It is that it operates on a different tolerance for stated certainty.

Two frameworks, one underlying instinct

I have spent the last few weeks running a workshop series that combined two sales methodologies: Great Demo![1] and Challenger[2]. On the surface, they solve different problems: one is about delivering an effective product demonstration, the other is about how you frame a conversation with a customer. But they turned out to be incredibly complementary, and having attended that marketing panel, I think I now understand why.

Both frameworks force a why-first structure onto material that would otherwise default to a what-first structure. Great Demo! insists you start from the customer's problem before you show a single feature. Challenger needs you to bring the customer a new way of seeing their own situation, a piece of insight they did not have before you walked in, before you ask for anything. Neither framework is only about technique. Both are about resisting the pull toward leading with the ‘what’.

That is the real reason the two sit well together. They are two disciplines addressing the same underlying resistance from two different directions.

What this means in practice

For marketers working with scientists, the panel's advice was to meet people where they are. Don’t walk up to a scientist and ask them to be your webinar. Build the relationship first, be curious about their actual work, and let the trust accumulate before you ask them to put their professional reputation on the line for your content. Several panellists made the same point in different words: when you ask a scientist to be the face of something, you are asking them to trust you with a reputation they have spent a career building carefully, one peer-reviewed publication at a time.

For scientists, the discomfort of leading with ‘why’ rather than ‘what’ is not a sign you are doing something wrong. It will not go away the first time you try it, and it does not mean you are being less rigorous or less honest. It means you are doing a different job than the one your training optimised you for, and that job is learnable, just as the first one was.

The adoption gap

This is the same pattern I keep coming back to in my work on adoption in life sciences software. Scientifically sound tools go unused not because the science is wrong, but because no one has successfully made the case for ‘why’ a bench scientist should change how they work. The tool's advocates default to ‘what’ it does, leaving the buyer to work out the ‘why’ on their own.

The discomfort that keeps a scientist from talking about the value of their own research is the same discomfort that keeps a software vendor from making the case for ‘why’ a customer should adopt the tool they bought. It is the same gap, wearing two different coats. Getting comfortable with ‘why’ is not a marketing skill bolted onto science. It is part of the job.

[1] Great Demo! How to Create and Execute Stunning Software Demonstrations, by Peter Cohan.

[2] The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation, by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson.