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Culture isn’t optional. It frames how people see and experience the world – and how they see and experience brands. Businesses and organisations exist within it by default, not by choice. In this environment, cultural relevance has become a defining marker of brand strength and long-term potential.
Life sciences companies spend an average of 12-14 years developing assets. Investing a lot of time entirely in the asset itself supported by a rigorous and necessary development process. This rigor has historically meant that the life sciences industry has leaned into being ‘product first’. However, this is changing!
What has been missing is an understanding of the cultural context your product is launching into or exists within. How are patient expectations evolving? What external forces are shaping HCP prescribing behaviour? Which therapeutic categories face disruption?
The GLP-1 market explosion looked sudden. But the cultural signals were already there. Proactive health optimisation, biohacking curiosity, and bottom-up weight management communities were all taking shape and evolving for years. The companies that attuned early to these signals, such as Hims & Hers, were already positioned when the market broke open.
Why the life sciences industry isn’t doing enough
It’s not that life sciences businesses are unaware of cultural shifts. Most teams recognise that customers and consumers behave differently, acknowledging that the dynamics and expectations are always evolving. However, this awareness rarely travels beyond the brand. Segmentations and personas are still largely treatment- or disease-led, leaving cultural context underexamined.
The challenge is translating cultural awareness into action while also looking ahead to the future. To increase their cultural relevance, life sciences businesses need to take more proactive steps to adapt rather than just reacting to situations as they evolve. This is especially important given how stringent this sector is and how long things take to develop.
The question isn’t whether cultural shifts are happening. It’s whether your organisation has a way to identify which shifts matter for your therapeutic areas and customers you are engaging with, when they’ll impact your brands, and what strategic decisions should change as a result.
What this looks like in practice
We recently ran a culture workshop with a top 10 global pharmaceutical company, bringing together teams from different areas within immunology to explore how cultural trends could be reshaping their markets.
We spent half a day exploring fast and slow culture and how some of the dominant and emergent trends have the potential to impact their strategy.
During the session we helped the team:
- Develop a deeper understanding of their evolving customer needs
- Be inspired by examples from different sectors outside of healthcare
- Identify cultural opportunities within immunology.
One participant called it ‘a chance to blow things up, talk blue sky.’ Another noted ‘Pharma is so regulated, it’s different from consumer – so it’s really useful to challenge our thinking this way.‘
We covered a broad spectrum of ideas, including packaging design changes, patient education material revisions, HCP engagement approaches – and even created a pitch document to sell in these ideas to their CEO.
"The workshop was a pivotal moment for our team—it got us thinking differently and considering cultural shifts that we simply hadn't thought about before. In pharma, we're often so focused on the brand level that we can miss the broader societal currents shaping how patients and healthcare providers engage with the world. This session challenged us to step back, look at the bigger picture, and ask ourselves: how do these cultural trends influence not just what we communicate, but how we connect? It's a mindset shift that will inform our strategy for years to come.”
The trends shaping the healthcare sector
Here’s a snapshot of the cultural trends that we focused on:
Health is no longer episodic
Health is becoming something to work towards vs thinking of it episodically. Health is a broader holistic concern with consumers and HCPs incorporating their own personal data into their health routines and even consultations.
What could this mean? Treatment benefits need to show up in how consumers measure and manage their daily health and align with more holistic approaches.
Consumers are increasingly more curious
With so much access to information, consumers are becoming more curious, creating a need for more information including the more complex scientific aspects.
What could this mean? Shared decision-making isn’t optional anymore – it’s what everyone expects. Are we developing materials and content that consumers can more easily engage with and supporting HCPs with the dialogue?
Trust comes from the crowd now
Healthcare professionals and consumers alike are relying increasingly on crowdsourced information. We find reliability in the masses and are being presented daily with social health cures that are harder for healthcare businesses to control.
What could this mean? Horizontal trust networks mean your messaging competes with peer experiences and crowdsourced information – including misinformation. Your communication strategy needs to account for how consumers and HCPs discover, validate, and share treatment information, not just how you wish they would.
Personalisation is now the baseline
Consumers expect personalisation as standard. They learn from others with the same condition, age, and lifestyle. HCPs also demand and expect more nuanced data grounded in patient types.
What could this mean? Generic education materials and one-size-fits-all treatment approaches feel outdated, especially when personalisation is part of everyday life and consumers are taking control of this with or without permission..
What becomes possible with cultural foresight?
Culture-aware healthcare companies can make better strategic choices by design and thus get ahead of the curve.
Examples include:
Portfolio strategy: Aligning assets to where customer expectations are moving
Launch positioning: Positioning strategies that reflect how beliefs are shifting and don’t feel outdated or too inward looking
Commercial execution: Content, messages, packaging, support materials are all designed around emerging expectations.
The companies paying attention now are positioning for advantage.
Work with us
We run culture workshops for pharmaceutical, biotech, and medtech companies. Cross-functional teams explore how cultural trends are reshaping their therapeutic areas and leave with implementation plans – not just insights reports.
Curious what cultural trends are affecting your therapy area? Get in touch to discuss a workshop for your teams.