A Splice of Life Science Marketing

A key account asks for a new format of a product you already sell, and the gate review takes twenty minutes because everything about it feels decided. Months later, the launch has answered one account's question and missed the jobs the wider market was hiring the product to do. Who this is for: product managers, product leads and product marketers at life science tools companies who own line e...

Shownotes: Jeff Bezos kept an empty chair in early Amazon meetings so everyone remembered the customer who was missing. Most decision rooms in life science still have the absence, and the research that could fill it sits unread on a shared drive. For product managers, marketing leaders and commercial teams at life science tools and diagnostics companies. Jasmine Gruia-Gray challenges Matt Wilkinso...

Your fastest AI user may also be your most expensive one. Workers say AI saves them around 11 hours a week, then hand roughly 6.4 of those hours straight back to checking and correcting the output. Matt Wilkinson and Jasmine Gruia-Gray call that hidden labour botsitting, and most teams have no idea how much of it they are doing. For life science marketers and product managers who have rolled out A...

Life science product leaders: surveys show what customers believe they do. Ethnography shows what they actually do, and that's the real gap. Shownotes A hand hygiene study at King's College London found that people who said they always washed their hands were caught doing it only a quarter as often as they claimed. The same gap hides in your customers' labs, in the habits they stopped...

Brooke B. Sellas shows life science marketers how two-way conversations on social produce measurable return. Your leadership team says there is no return on social media. They are probably right, because almost every brand is standing in the middle of the room waiting for people to come to them. Brooke Sellas of B Squared Media joins Matt Wilkinson and Jasmine Gruia-Gray to explain return on conve...

A paper in Nature found that models trained on model-generated data degrade one generation at a time, until the output collapses towards sameness. The same thing is happening to marketing teams, because everyone is drawing from the same public pool and buying the same four-workstream implementation playbook. Who this is for: commercial and marketing leaders at life science tools and diagnostics co...

Why 2 in 5 launched products fail commercially, and why it's not about money or talent—it's about asking the right questions. For example: Coca-Cola ran 190,000 blind taste tests before reformulating its flagship product. The research was rigorous. The result was catastrophic. They asked the wrong question. Who this is for: Product managers, marketing leaders, and commercial strategists at...

Your scientific advisory board just told you the product works. It never told you whether anyone in that building is allowed to buy it. Who this is for: Product managers and product marketing leaders selling into life science tools and diagnostics accounts. Matt and Jasmine unpack why glowing feedback from a scientific advisory board so often gets mistaken for a buying signal. They walk through ho...

The pipes for AI are already in the ground. Everything slowing the seventh wave down now sits inside your organisation and inside your buying group, and none of it is a technology problem. Who this is for: life science marketers, product leaders and commercial teams being asked what AI actually changes about their go-to-market. Matt Wilkinson and Jasmine Bar-Kochva work through Matt's blog pos...

Every organisation knows what groupthink looks like. Fewer have a name for group forgetting, which is what happens when months of buyer research collapse into a single customer quote that supports what the team had already decided. This one is for marketing leaders, product leads and commercial teams in life science tools and diagnostics who own the positioning and have to defend it upward. Matt W...

Matt Wilkinson explains organisational gravity and why his new book, The Buyer in the Loop, exists to stop the buyer's voice getting sanded out of marketing. Every persona gets built with real insight, then filed in a drawer within a month. Matt Wilkinson has watched it happen to his own clients for a decade, and he finally wrote a book about why. This episode is for commercial leaders, product ma...

Why most product teams cannot tell a dead project from an early one, and the three tests that separate a clean kill from a case worth tabling. Shownotes You have rebuilt the business case three times, the customer calls went fine, and it still feels like you are polishing a tombstone. The problem is rarely a missing kill decision or a missing budget, it is that a dead project and an early one look...

For life science PMs: at the gate, treat dissenting customers as evidence. Enthusiast quotes only confirm what you hoped. Most stage gate reviews are built to help a product pass. Whether it should pass is a different question, and the gate rarely asks it. That design produces confident decks and expensive mistakes. Who this is for: product managers, commercial leaders and gate committee members i...

A tied poll becomes buyer segmentation once you read who chose each option and why. You run a poll and the result lands in a dead heat. Most people mark it inconclusive and pick the option they already liked. This is for life science marketers and commercial leaders who run preference tests on positioning, covers, campaign assets or messaging hierarchies. Matt Wilkinson ran three cover designs for...

Pride in the output is the human test AI cannot replace, and it is what protects life science brands. Somewhere in your marketing stack right now, an AI is publishing faster than anyone can check it. This episode is about the quiet way that speed erodes trust before you notice it has gone. Who this is for: CEOs, commercial leaders and marketers at life science tools and diagnostics companies who a...

For life science marketers: why AI engines judge your pages on structure and schema, and how to stop yours being misread. We ran an AI search audit on its own website and the tool recommended building three pillar pages that already existed. The cause was five characters at the end of a URL, which made three of the company's most important pages invisible to the AI engines that buyers now use...

Three years into a development program, R and D says it won, commercial says it lost, and regulatory says everything was fine. They were all measuring different things, and nobody caught it at the gate where it mattered. This episode is for life science product managers, commercial leaders, and regulatory affairs leads running stage-gated development programs. Jasmine Gruia-Gray explains why most...

Uncertainty is the system, and life science marketers who build buyer presence into every decision are better equipped to navigate it. Your buyer was in the room at the start of the process. By the time the brief lands in legal, they have left. For life science product marketers, commercial leads, and anyone navigating a launch in a market that stopped following the old rules. Matt Wilkinson and J...

Life science CEOs embedding AI in compliance workflows face regulatory switching costs, not just technical ones, when models change. Shownotes: You didn't make one big decision to hand control of your compliance workflow to an AI vendor. You made five small ones, and each felt completely reasonable at the time. By the time the model update arrived, the exit cost wasn't a sprint of prompt r...

Scientist buyers use falsification logic -- one weak claim destroys your whole case -- so claim selection and buyer presence beat validation volume every time. Shownotes Your claims list passed legal, survived MS3, and still didn't land. The problem wasn't your evidence -- it was which claim was leading and whether your buyer was still in the room when you chose it. This episode is for lif...

AI agents are shortlisting life science suppliers before humans get involved - brands invisible to AI are losing demand they cannot measure. Shownotes: Your next buyer might never visit your website. AI agents are already shortlisting suppliers, summarising product pages, and filtering out brands with poor machine-readable content - before any human in procurement gets involved. For life science m...

Persona AI keeps the customer present through organisational gravity - the internal approval process that dilutes buyer insight before launch. You did the interviews. You built the personas. The campaign went to market and the open rates collapsed. The research was not the problem - the buyer left the room somewhere between the first draft and the final approval. This episode is for life science m...

Beta programs designed for validation rather than stress testing create launch liabilities that surface as field quality crises three to six months post-launch. Your beta sites completed the study. A KOL sent a positive note. Nobody filed a reproducibility complaint. You called it a validation and moved to launch. Then your field application scientist hit an edge case none of your beta sites ever...

Life science PMs can reclaim strategic time using the DRAG framework -- but only if those hours go back into customer discovery, not more admin. You reformatted a competitive comparison slide for sales. It took 40 minutes. They looked at it for 90 seconds. That gap -- between feeling productive and being strategic -- is exactly what this episode is about. Jasmine Gruia-Gray joins Matt Wilkinson to...

If your brand isn't cited by AI tools when buyers search your category, you're not losing a ranking - you're being skipped entirely before the decision is made. Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google AI Mode right now and type: "Name the top three companies in [your product category]." If your brand isn't in the answer, you're not losing a click. You're not even in t...