Building a Key Message Model That Sticks

How to Orchestrate with Relevance

In 1983, physicist Lorne Whitehead published a paper in the American Journal of Physics that described something deceptively simple: a domino can topple another domino about one and a half times larger than itself. It sounds like a party trick, but the implications are profound. Start with a domino only a few millimetres tall, and thirteen dominos later you are toppling a block over a metre high. Extend the sequence to twenty-nine dominos, and in theory you could knock over the Empire State Building.

What makes this possible is not the force of the first domino, but the order and proportion of the sequence. Each piece multiplies the energy of the one before it. Break the pattern, and the chain reaction fails.

Pharma communications work the same way. Every message is a domino: small on its own, limited in impact, but powerful when placed in sequence. Too often, however, companies fall into two traps. One is over-repetition, hammering the same point across every channel until HCPs switch off. The other is fragmentation, delivering different, disconnected messages in different places, which leaves HCPs confused about what the brand really stands for. In both cases, the sequence is broken and momentum is lost.

This is why a key message model is so important. It is not just a neat hierarchy of talking points but the organising framework that allows every interaction with an HCP to build on the last. When designed properly, it ensures that what a physician reads in an email, hears from a rep, or encounters at a congress are not isolated data points but parts of a coherent story unfolding step by step. The model acts like a blueprint for sequencing, showing how to move an HCP from awareness, to consideration, to conviction without fatigue or confusion along the way.

Crucially, those key messages must be standardised at the brand or disease level. Without this discipline, every team develops its own version of the narrative, creating duplication, inconsistency, and governance headaches. With it, medical, marketing, and market access are no longer competing for airtime but aligned around a shared foundation. Standardisation does not mean rigidity; the model still allows adaptation to different HCP profiles and market contexts. But the underlying code is consistent and recognisable, the same way DNA carries the blueprint for life across every cell.

The evidence for sequencing is compelling. Research in persuasion science has long shown that the order of arguments matters, influencing recall and conviction. Studies in digital advertising demonstrate that purposeful sequencing leads to higher retention and stronger downstream engagement than random or repetitive exposure. Memory research confirms that spacing and progression improve learning, while integrated marketing experiments show that the order in which audiences encounter messages across media changes how they remember and respond. All of this reinforces what we see in practice: when you structure messages to build momentum, you achieve a compounding effect that no single “big message” can deliver on its own.

A modern key message model goes even further. It not only structures the story but also enables measurement and orchestration. By tracking which messages have been delivered and engaged with across channels, mapping that history to individual HCP profiles, and learning which sequences resonate with which audiences, you gain the ability to recommend the next best message with precision. Add marketing mix modelling, and you can even quantify which specific messages are driving prescription behaviour and which are not. The model evolves from a communication framework into a feedback engine, continuously optimising itself.

This is what we mean when we say that key message models turn communication into momentum. They allow every interaction to matter, every channel to contribute, and every team to work from the same foundation. They replace noise with sequence, confusion with clarity, and scatter with measurable impact.

Pharma companies do not need more content; they need more coherence. A key message model, standardised by brand and activated across the organisation, is how you achieve it. At Forge DC, we build them to ensure that the science speaks clearly, the story unfolds deliberately, and the dominos do not just fall, but build unstoppable force.

Looking to build a key message model that improves your data quality and orchestrates personalised narratives effectively across channels?

Book a meeting with our team and let’s design the framework that turns your communications into measurable momentum.

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