The pharmaceutical category has the hardest PR problem in the Fortune 500. Audiences distrust the industry, regulators restrict the messaging, and the default creative template — clinical, corporate, adjective-heavy — reinforces both problems.
AstraZeneca and Edelman broke that template in 2024-2025 with "Nico and Chloe," a corporate reputation campaign that won at the 2025 PRWeek Healthcare Awards.
The approach: stop advertising the company. Start telling patient stories.
The first story follows Nico, a student with asthma who can now run because of scientific innovation. The second follows Chloe, a cancer survivor who commemorates her journey with a tattoo. The campaign was built digital-first, anchored by a new landing page and a content system that let the stories travel across social and earned media.
Results from the first two weeks of the campaign, as reported by PRWeek: the Science and Innovation pages on AstraZeneca's website pulled close to 41,000 visits — more than triple the prior baseline.
Most pharmaceutical corporate reputation campaigns try to solve a trust problem by talking more. AstraZeneca solved it by talking less — about themselves — and making room for patients to talk instead.
That's not a creative trick. It's a reputation strategy with a century of research behind it: third-party voices drive more trust than brand voices, and personal narratives drive more trust than institutional ones. The campaign put those two principles on top of each other.
Healthcare, financial services, legal services, and energy all operate under the same constraint. They can't say most of what they want to say directly. So they have to engineer situations where someone else can say it for them.
Patient storytelling is one version. Customer advocacy programs are another. Third-party research reports are a third. The structural move is the same: get the message out of the brand's mouth and into someone else's.
1. Trust transfers through people, not logos. If you're running corporate reputation work and your campaign features more shots of your office than of your customers, you're building a brochure — not reputation.
2. Digital-first doesn't mean social-only. The AstraZeneca campaign built a content hub first and let social amplify it. That's why the site traffic moved. A social-only version would have died after the scroll.
3. Measure reputation work against owned-media depth, not just reach. Three-times baseline site traffic on substantive pages is a reputation signal. A viral impression count isn't.
For any regulated brand that's been told their category is "too boring for storytelling," this campaign is the counter-example. The category isn't boring. The storytelling is. For a purpose-driven parallel from a regulated consumer category, see our analysis of Heineken's "Starring Bars".
The Everything-PR Editorial Team produces original reporting, research, and analysis on communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question. Publishing since 2009.
Rex F. Harlow (1892–1993) — founder of the American Council on Public Relations, organizer of the first national professional body, and the practitioner who turned PR into a self-governing profession. The EPR In Memoriam canonical record.
Ivy Ledbetter Lee (1877–1934) — author of the Declaration of Principles, counsel to the Rockefellers and the Pennsylvania Railroad, and the practitioner who invented the modern press release. The EPR In Memoriam canonical record.
Scott M. Cutlip (1915–2000) — co-author of Effective Public Relations, dean of the Henry W. Grady College, and the scholar who built the academic foundation of the field. The EPR In Memoriam canonical record.
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