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What do Coca-Cola and the patient-centricity movement have in common?

According to Jill Donahue, author, speaker and cofounder of The Aurora Project, both create an emotional connection and a sense of purpose. This comparison may seem unsavoury — one has the effect of causing obesity and ill-health while the other improves and saves lives— but Donahue is on to something.

"People everywhere know that Coca-Cola teaches the world to sing in perfect harmony. Coca-Cola figured out how to bottle happiness. We, in pharma, who actually bottle miracles have done a very poor job of communicating that. Most think of pharma companies as bottling pills instead of bottling the life changing miracles that we bring to the world," says Donahue. 

This might be chalked up to the fact that pharma has naturally focused on the medical sciences but not the behavioral sciences in its value creation. But the behavioral sciences are the final mile to impact change. "Without understanding what drives behavior, we can’t have the impact we need," she says.