Getting Started

Your biotech is about to go public. Your company has just gone through a merger or acquisition. Your organization has experienced a major crisis. Whatever the reason, you need to create — or recreate — your company brand.

How do you create a brand with staying power that reflects who you really are and what you really offer? Like most things, it involves a lot of upfront work. The great brands are profoundly connected to their markets and stakeholders.

You want to be sure that your brand team is immersed in these three things

Your market

Your current stakeholders' beliefs and behaviors

Your company's goals

Know Your Market –

If you have a marketing department or other marketing support, they should be a great resource for you. If not, make the commitment to put in the research time. Investing your time now will save you and your organization more time, money and headaches down the road.

Who is your competition and what are they doing? What are their reputations? If they have marketed products, what is their market share? What is in their pipelines?

What is the economy like in your sector and/or therapeutic areas? What are the payment trends and who is making those decisions? What are the regulatory guidelines?

Who are your key players? Physicians? Patients? Investors? Regulators? Are their needs being met in the current market? What do they wish were different or better about your sector or therapeutic areas?

What strengths does your organization offer the market? Are they unique? What is your promise to your key players? What are your weaknesses, especially compared to your competition?

Once you have found the answers to these questions, go back and do the whole thing again projecting five years ahead.

Know Your Current Stakeholders' Beliefs and Behaviors –

Do research and conduct stakeholder interviews so that you can answer these questions for each group:

What is their:

• Current belief — about their condition if they are patients, about the current treatment options if they are physicians, about the sector and/or your pipeline if they are investors?
• Current behavior — what does a patient do after diagnosis? How are physicians making their treatment choices and why? Are investors investing in your sector or are they waiting to invest and why? Do they see the circumstances changing and when?

Now is the time to conduct some soul searching with your company management and thought leaders.:

Which of your stakeholders' beliefs and behaviors do you want to be different?

• The beliefs you would like your stakeholders to have
• The behaviors you would like your stakeholders to exhibit
• The importance of the desired changes — which of these changes are very important to your company and which are just a 'nice to have?'

Define Your Goals –

Revisit your stakeholders' current issues and wishes and articulate them. For example, an oncologist's wish could be expressed this way: "I wish there was a way for me to know which therapy my patients will respond to best, so that I could do more to help them before their cancers progress."

Next, revisit the desired beliefs and goals your company has for your stakeholders. Staying with the oncologist example: Your company may want oncologists to see them as an ally. Is there a way to demonstrate your company's ability – or strong intent — to help oncologists do more to help their patients? Do you have a diagnostic or screening test? Are you working to develop diagnostics for your therapies?

Now the work of creating your company brand can truly begin.

If this post has been helpful to you, please let me know.  You will be helping me to decide if I should continue describing how to build a company brand in future posts. Thank you.