Based in the Boston, Sreejit Mohan brings a wealth of regional and pharmaceutical sector knowledge to the Linq Advisory Board.
Sreejit Mohan, VP and Global Head of Communications for Specialty Care at Sanofi and the newest member of Linq Advisors’ advisory board, reflects on two decades spent building reputation and trust across global pharma.
Sreejit Mohan has spent more than two decades shaping reputation and trust for some of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, most recently as VP and Global Head of Communications for Specialty Care at Sanofi in the US. He’s bringing that experience to Linq Advisors as its newest advisory board member.
“I’ve worked with Dennis in the past. I know his approach to reputation management: using frameworks, using a solid analytics platform to guide insight and decision-making,” he says of what drew him to Linq. “There’s a strong alignment in how we think about building reputation management strategies inside large corporate settings.”
That wasn’t the only factor. Mohan was drawn to how Linq’s founder, Dennis Larsen, was positioning the firm, not as an activation or campaigning shop, but as a strategic consultancy offering real decision support to senior communications leaders, C-suite executives and boards.
“It was a very differentiated offering,” he notes. The network Larsen has assembled was another key element, Mohan adds: “It was an opportunity for me to both learn and contribute to the evolution of the practice.” He is energised by the opportunity to help Linq become a leading voice in strategic, insight-driven reputation management, and a pioneer in AI-augmented practice.
Mohan’s own career has given him a front-row seat to reputation management at its most consequential. Across roles at Novartis, Sandoz, Bayer and FleishmanHillard, he has guided companies through financial communications, crisis management, M&A and the introduction of complex new medicines, including biosimilars and gene therapies. That experience has sharpened a clear distinction he draws between reputation and trust.
“For a corporate brand, reputation is what your stakeholders know you for and know you as. It’s a bit retrospective. Trust is different: it’s the belief that you’ll consistently deliver on your commitments. It’s more forward looking,” he explains.
Over the years, he’s built a systems approach to measuring reputation and trust. “Reputation and stakeholder trust are composites. A one-size-fits-all measurement score doesn’t mean a lot,” he continues. “Every company has many reputations. They differ by stakeholder, by geography, by issue, by where you are in your lifecycle. You can’t apply a single metric and call it done.”
“Dennis said we could go down the cookie-cutter path, or we could create something relevant to us,” Mohan recalls of building a bespoke framework to measure trust during his time at Novartis. The resulting model blended stakeholder surveys with attitudinal studies, rankings and social sentiment data, aligned to the business priorities. “It showed us for example which therapeutic areas we were strong in and what factors were contributing and which ones didn’t matter. That drove home the importance of thinking of reputation in plural terms.”
It’s an approach he believes the industry needs to scale, especially as data and AI reshape what’s possible. “The opportunity is to get better at synthesising existing data sets, rather than always depending only on custom studies,” he says. “Comms functions can also do more to influence the research already happening elsewhere in the business, whether that’s customer surveys or HR data, and get closer to real-time insight.” He’s candid about the gap: “Pharma can learn from FMCG, tech and oil and gas, where there’s far more innovation in reputation analytics.”
On building reputation in the US, Mohan argues global brands don’t have the home market advantage that local brands enjoy, and that the country needs to be treated more like fifty markets than just one. “State contexts differ, local issues differ, the media market is fragmented, so if you are building reputation and trust for the long term, you have to factor in very local even community-based approaches. with,” he notes.
Asked for one piece of advice to fellow communications leaders heading into 2027, his answer is a single word. “Prepare,” he says. “Prepare for AI’s impact, for more fragmentation, for more geopolitical upheaval. And prepare yourself, too. Now more than ever, as a comms leader you need the resilience to constantly process multiple stakeholder views, navigate pace and complexity and lead your teams without wearing yourself thin.”
His closing message, though, reaches beyond Linq. It’s a message he’d give to communications leaders everywhere:
“Do the hard work of developing a custom approach for each company, rather than reaching for quick fixes,” he says. “Too often in our industry, we create vanity metrics just to feel and sound important. Don’t do it for the vanity metrics. Do the work because there’s real impact, and you’re convinced of it. Otherwise, you’re just chasing numbers that don’t move anything, and wasting resources doing it.”