The challenge

There are many ways to go about building a new brand. Selling data is increasingly futile in a competitive environment with diminishing opportunity for outright clinical differentiation. Solving problems makes for great brands. We believe that an ‘outside-in’ approach is crucial. To win, your brand must be anchored in incisive insight about the patient and customer experience, so it is fully equipped to solve real world problems for its customers.

Our client needed to develop global brand architecture for an early-stage oncology asset. This asset was based on innovative platform technology and promised to fundamentally change the treatment approach. We partnered with our client on the journey from market understanding to brand building, providing strategic consultancy as well as bespoke market research capabilities to lay the foundations for global launch.

The solution

Our solution was based on an outside-in, integrated approach – right from initial diagnosis of the key issues through to selection of the global brand architecture.

Diagnose: In many cases, knowledge and insight are spread across team members, and understanding can become fragmented over time. To combat this, we synthesised existing knowledge from market research and interviewed key stakeholders. This process revealed emerging trends and helped level-set understanding across the team, so that we could focus in on the perceived knowledge gaps concerning the patient and HCP experience.

Create: Great brands are driven by clarity, focus and belief. Addressing these three deceptively simple aspects is pivotal to building an emotionally resonant and differentiated brand. We created cross-functional workshop sessions based around a systematic brand mapping and brand shaping framework. This prioritised space for creative thinking and formed the backbone of efforts to develop brand purpose, positioning routes, and high-level message options.

Explore: Our integrated market research programme evaluated both the emotional and rational resonance of the positioning routes and aligned message buckets. The insights formed the springboard for the creation of brand architecture.

The outcome

Select: Insight informs, but bold strategic choices make for great brands. We held a final set of workshop sessions, which helped systematically identify a winning strategy for the brand. The resulting new global brand architecture has since guided global and local tactical launch activity.

Identifying most compelling advertising idea for oncology brand