There's a Role Missing Inside Your Biological Company
TL;DR
Most lean biological startups don't have anyone whose job it is to sit between science and commercial and make sure the translation actually works. Without that function, marketers get gun shy, content dries up, and generic messaging takes over by default. The role looks less like a communications hire and more like an embedded company reporter — someone who finds the stories inside the science and makes sure they survive the trip to market. This function exists informally inside a lot of biological companies already. The question is whether anyone is set up to do it well.
Most lean biological startups are running with a small team doing the work of a much larger one.
That's not a criticism. That's just the reality of building something new in a capital-intensive industry. You hire for what feels most urgent: scientists, salespeople, a single marketing person. It could even be an agency that you should be managing but aren't able to put the time into making it a meaningful partnership.
What almost no one hires for (because it doesn't have a clean title yet) is the person who sits between science and commercial and makes sure the translation actually works.
That gap is costing you more than you think.
What Breaks Without It
Here's the pattern I've watched play out more than once.
Marketing needs content. They go to the science team. What comes back is accurate, thorough, and completely unusable. It's written for a peer review, not a product page. Marketing rewrites it. A scientist sees the rewrite and feels like the meaning got gutted. They say so. Marketing gets corrected enough times that they stop being ambitious. They get gun shy.
And when marketers get gun shy, the defaults take over.
Yield claims.
ROI numbers.
Better than claims [X bu/acre over competition]
It's generic positioning that looks identical to every other Ag company. The factory default, if you will.
So nothing of substance gets published. Sales doesn't have what they need. And the product, which might be genuinely differentiated, never gets communicated that way.
This is not a marketing problem. It's not a science problem. It's a structural gap.
The Role That Fills It
Think of it less like a communications hire and more like an embedded company reporter.
Someone who sits in the science meetings, the data reviews, the product development conversations and listens for something different than everyone else in the room.
Not mechanisms.
Not statistical significance.
Not pathway nuance.
They're listening for the story. The one that explains what this product actually does, for whom, under what conditions, and why a grower would care.
They ask different questions.
What problem does this solve in the field?
When does that problem show up?
What does a grower's operation actually look like when this product is working?
Sometimes it's asking the science team to add a specific treatment and take a picture or short video. Then they take what they heard back to the marketing team. Not as a finished piece, but as a rough idea with enough shape to build from.
From there it looks different every time.
Sometimes it's a whiteboard session mapping out where a product fits inside a grower's system. Sometimes it's working through how one product line serves completely different industry segments, and then being a resource for building sell sheets that speak to each of them specifically. Other times, it's a text at 8am that just says does this line hold up before I publish it?
Every time, the function is the same: making sure something real and accurate gets communicated and that the science doesn't collapse in the process.
Why This Is Hard to Find
The person who can do this well needs to understand the science well enough to know when it's been lost in translation. And they need to understand the market well enough to know what's actually worth saying.
That's not a scientist. That's not a marketer. It's a third thing that most biological companies aren't actively looking for because it's hard to define. Most companies don't know it's missing until the content dries up and they can't figure out why.
What makes it work isn't credentials. It's approachability and editorial instinct. The marketer needs to feel like they can pick up the phone before something goes live. The scientist needs to trust that their work isn't going to be flattened. And the person in the middle needs to be sharp enough to recognize a good story when they're sitting inside a data review that everyone else thinks is just an internal meeting.
Translation is not simplification. It's compression with the context still intact.
This Is One Piece of a Bigger Problem
The messaging breakdown, the sales frustration, the generic positioning are not a content problem or even a marketing problem.
It starts with biological companies inheriting a commercialization structure that was built for large-scale chemistry companies. And chemistry never needed this function because its products don't require this kind of translation. The gap was never obvious because it was never a gap before.
But biology is different. The context dependency, the system-level thinking, the mechanism of action all require someone who can carry it through the commercial process without losing what makes it credible. This is a role for someone whose instinct is to think in systems, not in linear cause-and-effect — and who was trained that way.
If you want to go deeper on why this keeps happening, The Chemistry Playbook is a good place to start. If the sales frustration is what's most familiar, Why Biological Products Struggle to Scale gets into the systems problem underneath it. And Ag Biologicals Need a Rebrand is about what it looks like to change the approach from the ground up.
The embedded communications role doesn't solve all of it. But it closes a gap that most biological companies don't know they have. Until they find someone who fills it.
This is one part of what I do inside the companies I work with. If it sounds familiar, let's talk.
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A marketer's job is to generate demand. This role's job is to make sure what marketing says is scientifically grounded and commercially relevant. It's less about campaigns and more about keeping the integrity of the science intact through the translation process. Most marketing people don't have the scientific background to do that. Most scientists don't have the commercial instinct. This sits in between.
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Because biological products are inherently more complex to communicate than chemistry-based inputs. A herbicide has a single target and a predictable outcome. A biological product works within a system — soil, climate, crop, management practice all factor in. That complexity doesn't disappear when it hits a product page. Someone has to carry it through without losing what makes it credible.
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A science communicator translates outward. This role moves in both directions. It brings commercial questions into scientific conversations and brings scientific grounding back to commercial ones. It's as much about asking the right questions in a data review as it is about reviewing a product page before it goes live. The editorial instinct matters as much as the scientific one.
