SCIENCE X MARKETING: it's more than just a book

Living and loving life at the intersection of science and marketing

We published our third book! On May 17-18, Fancy Comma published SCIENCE X MARKETING. You can find it on Amazon here. It’s written by Sheeva, and edited by Kelly and Kevin. It was a team effort!

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SCIENCE X MARKETING is my effort to sum up 10 years of lessons learned working in a space most people cannot — mostly because there is no natural path to working at this intersection. For 10 years, I did science research, with some goals of getting a PhD and working in science policy and being a researcher. I quickly had to pivot when my PhD plans crumbled, so then I became a writer. Therefore, my work in this space is a natural outgrowth of my need to pay the bills. Just because I encountered this work randomly doesn’t mean it wasn’t important. Important people hired me to communicate science, in the pandemic, amidst rising misinformation and anti-science backlash…and it paid off. Literally. I communicated science so much in the pandemic that I made enough money to buy my first car — ever!

One marketer who hired me told me that they did so specifically because my combination of scientific knowledge and marketing skills was a rare find in the world. This made me think: if there were more people on my same career path, maybe we would be better off as a world!

In a way, I wrote this book so that others do not have to travel the same jagged path I did. In retrospect, if I would have had a book to read like SCIENCE X MARKETING, that would have been preferable.

I like to think of SCIENCE X MARKETING as documentation of my time navigating uncharted territory. Sure, there are a lot of scientists who are science writers, but I have only met a handful of people like myself, who work at the boundaries of science and marketing.

Just because this career path is not a mainstream one doesn’t mean it is not necessary. It does mean, however, that this path is very solitary. On the Fancy Comma YouTube, I talked to many people who communicated science in the pandemic — not for a journalistic audience, but for a general audience. Check out that playlist here. (I’m interested in speaking to more people who communicated pandemic science, so if you’re one of those people, get in touch! I’d love to interview you.)

If the pandemic taught me anything, it’s that we need a whole lot more people working on the boundaries of science and marketing. Sadly, they are two different worlds, as I recount in my book. Read an excerpt here to get an idea of the ways in which marketers and scientists refer to the same concept in different ways. It’s a lot to get used to, balancing the two — but it’s crucially necessary.

Why should we work at the intersection of science and marketing more? In case you didn’t know, marketing pays well — a lot better than science. Another reason is that combining the two areas helps solve tough challenges, like the COVID-19 pandemic. Even just having a SCIENCE X MARKETING mindset also helps develop communication skills — so that we, as scientists, can meet policymakers where they are with their exceptional, often perplexing, communication finesse. A world in which scientists and marketers work alongside each other also provides a defense against scientific misinformation.

The benefits are clear for society but also for marketing itself. Fusing science and marketing, companies selling legit science-based products and services (think biotech companies, for instance) can create better products in industry informed by science, and communicate that science better.

Working at the intersection of science and marketing for 10+ years, I have learned: just because science and marketing don’t normally go together doesn’t mean they shouldn’t. It’s actually pretty fun existing at the intersection of these worlds. I’m both a scientist and a marketer, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Pick up a copy of SCIENCE X MARKETING here!

What we’ve been doing this month

This past month, on our YouTube, I chatted with Santiago Gisler about AI, talked about political will as a renewable resource, and mentioned that we paid down $30k of our debt over the past year, amidst economic uncertainty. Being a freelancer is still challenging in this economy, and even moreso for women-owned businesses such as ours which operate with smaller margins, but we are lucky to say that we are still thriving.

I’ve also been lecturing for the Fancy Comma SciComm course. We’re finally halfway through the course: catch up on Week 4 (“Science communication levels the playing field for all”), Week 5 (“What is sociology of science?”), and Week 6 (“No! More! Jargon!”) here, or view the whole playlist.

Over on the blog, I’ve been writing about becoming (metaphorically) ungovernable, talking about the neuroscience of journalism, and recapping the AAAS 2024 Annual Meeting science policy sessions: I blogged about ways to get into science policy as a scientist and the US executive branch this month.

That’s it for this month! Thank you for reading. If you liked this newsletter, please share it!