What Two New Comms Leaders Are Walking Into: The Pharma Reputation Brief

Two consumer health companies recently announced significant moves at the top of their communications functions: Hims & Hers Health, Inc. named Kathryn Beiser as its new Chief Communications Officer and Kenvue promoted Melissa Witt to Head of External Communications.

While hiring news is not something often tied to RepTrak's blog, the timing feels significant when viewed against the backdrop of industry-specific reputation data. The consumer health and pharma reputation landscape has shifted structurally since the COVID peak, and not in ways that more communications activity alone will fix. Whether coming in fresh or stepping up from within, the brief looks the same.

Though this post is specific to pharma industry data, the context is one that every comms leader can learn from. Here's what the data says they're dealing with as they start their new roles.

Shift 1: Stakeholders have stopped caring what you make. They're watching how you behave.

For years, pharma's reputation playbook leaned heavily on its obvious strengths: products and innovation. And for a long time, the data supported that instinct. But the ground has moved.

Looking at driver weight data across the U.S. pharma sector from 2022 to 2025, Products/Services has declined from 17.6% of reputation weight to 16.3%. Innovation has remained relatively flat. What is notable is the convergence happening across all drivers: Conduct and Citizenship, the behavioral dimensions of reputation, have held steady, narrowing the gap between what stakeholders think companies do well and what they think actually matters to them.

The more telling story is in the scores. Products and Services consistently scores in the mid-to-high 70s. Conduct scores in the low 70s. That gap may sound modest, but in a category where companies are otherwise tightly clustered, a structural underperformance on the dimensions stakeholders are increasingly weighing is a strategic liability, not a communications gap.

For a new comms leader, this means the portfolio of stories being managed has fundamentally rebalanced. Announcing a new product or a clinical milestone does not move reputation the way it used to. What moves it is whether stakeholders believe the company is behaving well, being straight with them, and acting in society's interest, not just its own.

Shift 2: The channels you control are the ones that matter least.

Here is the uncomfortable structural reality: the touchpoints with the greatest impact on pharma reputation are precisely the ones that communications functions do not own.

Data across 2025 and into early 2026 shows Direct experience, meaning word of mouth and personal interaction, carrying an average impact score of 11.5. Earned media runs at 6.9. Owned and paid channels sit at 7.9 and 7.7 respectively, fluctuating month to month without a consistent edge.

The old hierarchy, where paid amplifies, owned supports, and earned validates, does not describe how reputation actually forms. Direct experience and earned coverage shape perception with an authority that no owned content budget can replicate. And for pharma, where skepticism is baked in, the asymmetry is especially pronounced.

This has a concrete implication for stakeholder distribution. Roughly 40 to 45% of the informed public qualifies as an ambassador: stakeholders who will say positive things, recommend, and give the benefit of the doubt. Another 7 to 8% are detractors. That leaves the majority in the fence-sitter category: not hostile, but not converted, and highly susceptible to what they hear from others rather than from the company itself.

The job, then, is not primarily to maximize output from owned channels. It is to design conditions, through third-party validation, HCP engagement, policy credibility, and executive visibility, that shape what the earned ecosystem is saying. Communications leaders are managing an ecosystem they cannot fully control. That is the mandate.

Shift 3: The familiarity dividend from COVID has expired.

The pandemic gave pharma an unusual gift: sustained, intense public attention. Familiarity spiked. Companies became household names. It felt like a turning point.

It was not. Or rather, it was a moment, and the moment has passed.

The familiarity data tells a clear story. The share of the informed public rating pharma companies as "familiar" or "highly familiar" has declined sharply, from roughly 34% in 2021 to around 16% in 2024 and 2025, a drop of nearly 18 percentage points. And reputation scores, which improved during and after the COVID peak, have not recovered the familiarity that was lost. The industry is losing audience without gaining advocates.

The business outcome data makes the problem concrete. Among stakeholders who are familiar enough to have an opinion, "buy" and "recommend" intentions generate ambassador rates around 44%. "Trust to do the right thing" sits at about 41%. "Benefit of the doubt," the crisis buffer that every company eventually needs, comes in at roughly 37%.

That last number matters most. Benefit of the doubt is the outcome that only gets tested when something goes wrong. And pharma, by the nature of the industry, is always one headline away from something going wrong.

The new mandate: trust architecture

Taken together, these three shifts describe a reputation environment that rewards a different kind of communications leadership. The category is less familiar to its audiences than it was three years ago. Its most important reputation drivers are structurally underperforming. And the channels with the most credibility are the hardest to orchestrate.

The implication is not that communications does not matter, it matters enormously. But the role has evolved. The comms leader who succeeds in this environment is not primarily a message architect or a channel strategist.

They are a trust architect: someone who understands that reputation is built through behavior as much as narrative, that third-party credibility outweighs owned voice, and that the real measure of success is not volume of output, but whether stakeholders are willing to extend good faith when it counts.