Selling Our Bodies: Biotech Branding and Marketing

As an advertising and marketing firm that has worked with biotech brands in the past, we have collected some common words of advice for biotech companies ready to announce their research, seek funding, or bring a product to market. While our ad agency produces custom work, and our guidance varies on a case by case basis, this article can guide you through the branding and marketing process.

Consider this: who is your audience?

This basic question is something that a lot of advertising and marketing agencies will get wrong because it is so basic. Your messaging and strategy will all hinge on who it’s intended audience is. For biotech companies, you may have more than one target group to consider. On the consumer side alone, your technology might help people with conditions that affect a range of people. If you are treating pain, your buyer could be an elderly retired factory worker, a serious athlete in his 20s, or a truck driver who sits on his lower back wrong all day and need some relief. A wearable fitness monitor could conceivably be marketed to anybody with a pulse.

Outside of consumers, you may need to appeal to investors, regulators, retailers, health professionals (doctors, physical therapists, trainers, etc.), and tech or health reporters. Those peoples; interest in your product have very little to do with one another, so you need to approach them differently to gain their attention.

Create a lifestyle proposition.

Once you understand your audience, you should know their trials and tribulations, their ailments and frustrations. Next, you need to present the ideal life. For example, an ad for something that treats people with arthritis might show some handsome gray-haired people windsurfing, or backpacking through the Swiss Alps. A product that helps diabetics monitor their blood sugar could show someone at a fancy dinner party, because that’s way more aspirational than a fast food drive-through. The point is that these representations are what your audience strives for, and it also defies the stereotypes that define peoples expectations of them. So you are implying that by using your products, they are going to live more interesting, exotic lives, and that you are and ally to them by not giving into societal expectations imposed on them. The audience is the hero, and you are helping them become the hero.

Get out of your head, and your industry.

People who work in biotech and medical tend to be pretty smart, analytical, and rational. So are all the colleagues and friends around them. So it’s easy to forget that most individuals on the planet are not like that. Most people, or really all people, are incapable of objectively looking at facts and data without being manipulated by feelings. You might have some statistics that are thrilling to you and your colleagues, but other people are going to need to see why it is so exciting. They need some sort of story or emotional hook to grab onto.

That’s why you need to present a clear vision of what life with your product is like. And if you need help, get in touch with a biotech marketing and branding agency like ours.