Richard Anderson

by Richard Anderson

Wherever your business sits in the bioscience ecosystem, the brand is the foundation of your company’s reputation and it’s as important for businesses in the bioscience sector as in any other. The brand is your company’s promise to its stakeholders, from customers to staff and from investors to regulators and it needs to communicate the substance of your business in a way that creates the best possible perception in people’s minds when they hear the company’s name.

So how do you build a brand platform to underpin your company’s communications? A good way to think about it is shown here and in the bioscience sector it’s a usually a mix of scientific expertise, commercial strength and corporate reputation.

Corporate, Scientific and Commercial positioningDeveloping the brand platform isn’t difficult but it does need to be done objectively with the complete support of the company’s senior management. There are various ways of doing this but a workshop, facilitated by someone outside the business who can be objective and can lead the group through the necessary thinking is a probably the quickest way to go about it. Once that’s complete and you have a concise, compelling and inspiring way of articulating exactly what your business is about you can construct the messages that you want to convey to your audiences. You’ll need to be clear about the problems that you’re trying to solve, about the extent and value of your company’s contribution and what actions you want people to take once they understand what you’re doing.

Next, you’ll need to develop the communications plan, making sure that it plays to the company’s strengths:

  • Demonstrating the scientific foundations on which the company is built
  • Showing how this will translate into valuable products and services
  • Pointing to the best possible future through the capable management team and convincing strategic plan.

So far so good, now for a sanity-check. Take all of the word content of your company’s current website and drop it into a wordcloud. What does it show you? Does it reflect the brand promise and the key messages that you’ve developed? Often it doesn’t and this rapid diagnostic is a good indicator telling you that you need to go back and re-work your website and your marketing materials to ensure consistency across the board. Roll out the results of this work inside the company as well as outside and you should find that your new brand promise starts to engage people in a more valuable way.

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Sophie Protheroe, senior account manager