Medical Device Link.

Originally Published June 2000

ADVERTISING, DISTRIBUTION, & SALES

Brand Faceting: A Gem of a Marketing Idea

Developing an effective branding campaign lays the foundation for successful sales.

Coke. Nike. Gap. Powerful names, powerful brands. Just one word conjures up many images—some positive, some negative. Successful branding campaigns effectively communicate the brand to the audience that comes into contact with the brand's product or service. It is this attention to audience perceptions that is the precursor to creating a positive public mindset. Ultimately, it lays the foundation for a successful sales effort, which companies in the commercial sector have been taking advantage of for years.

Today, there's a lot of talk in the medical device industry about creating brands—which is great. Branding is an effective tool for long-term marketing—and one that the healthcare marketplace has too often ignored, primarily because of a failure to understand exactly what a brand is and how it can be created effectively in this arena.

Such confusion, ironically, probably stems from the typical perception of brands: namely, our own, individual perceptions as consumers. All of us are part of many audiences for many brands. Every day we encounter numerous brand-building messages, from billboards and TV spots to brochures and underwriting announcements to logo marks on coffee cups and cars. In fact, as a culture, we have come to rely on brands to help inform our purchasing decisions.

The idea of building a brand may intuitively seem to necessitate the creation of a gargantuan mega-consciousness about a company. At the very least, it's likely to seem an overwhelming undertaking, especially for a smaller company with comparatively limited marketing dollars.

Fortunately, this perception is not accurate. Branding, in its essence, is best understood as a theory of marketing that can be applied to any company or product, regardless of the size of the marketing budget, the industry category, or the composition of the audiences.

Furthermore, building a brand has become a necessity for competing long-term in today's market, and is quickly becoming imperative for competing in the short-term as well. Ultimately, when done properly, brand building is efficient; it is a sound method for making a great impact on audiences—even with limited marketing resources.

Why Brand?

While consumers—particularly teenagers and young adults—who watch the Gap's hip "swing dancers" TV commercials may be inspired to run out to the nearest store and buy some khakis, the healthcare industry is a different story. Studies show that, when it comes to purchasing healthcare, consumers feel they are not adequately informed, that they do not have the necessary expertise, and that they don't have the mechanisms by which to evaluate healthcare products and services. Therefore, they believe that they are not empowered to make astute decisions.

It is probable that decisions that affect a consumer's health naturally bring about more trepidation than choices that relate to their nonhealth purchases. As well, consumers often are pressured to make certain decisions about healthcare during a time constricted by their own or a loved one's immediate health needs. In such situations, they may feel overwhelmed by the sudden confrontation with what are often complex issues and scenarios. They may become frustrated by the amount of—or even the lack of—information that needs to be processed to feel confident they are making the right choice. Certainly, such emotionally escalated instances will quickly come to mind when consumers consider their subsequent choices regarding healthcare, and may very well influence or taint their ultimate decisions.

This being the case, it is then the job of the healthcare advertiser to empower its audiences so that the purchase of the company's product or service is believed to be in the audience's best interest.

An effective way of achieving this marketing objective is to employ brand faceting.

Brand Faceting in Action

The idea of "brand faceting" is derived from the composition of the healthcare marketplace. No other arena necessitates that marketers reach such a wide variety of audiences. Doctors, facilities managers, distributors, materials managers, investors, payers, and patients all have distinctly different agendas and needs. What's more, budget restrictions place their time at a premium. Therefore, they are looking for specific messages to aid their decisions. Doctors are looking for the facts on efficacy; materials managers for quality, bundling options, and pricing; and patients for a ray of clarity amidst the swirl of decisions they face.

Adding to the confusion is the latest trend in healthcare marketing: direct-to-consumer advertising. No longer solely the purview of established pain-reliever brands, now clinical research trials, prescription medicine, providers, managed care—you name it—are inundating audiences with information. Without a proper approach to branding, such efforts can cause nearly irreparable damage to market share and brand equity. Patients grow mistrustful and cynical. Physicians resent being bypassed by companies that direct patients to request specific medications. And the government grows more and more wary of the encroachment of consumerism on what has traditionally been an arena removed from the fray of advertising.

Brand faceting allows a medical company's brand to be seen by any number of diverse audiences. It takes the essence of the brand and presents it in a context that is relevant to a particular audience. By doing so, brand faceting helps to intensely focus a marketing message so that it resonates with its target audiences in the most compelling way possible, and, as such, empowers each audience to feel confident about its healthcare purchase.

Take, for example, the brand-building campaign conducted by BBK Brand Ingenuity (Newton, MA) for C. R. Bard's line of hernia prostheses. Building Bard Mesh—a surgical prosthesis that minimizes postoperative pain, recuperation time, and recurrence by enabling a "tension-free" hernia repair—into the category's "gold-standard" brand took years, some groundbreaking thought, and tenacity. It took convincing surgeons—who were securely entrenched in performing traditional, tissue-to-tissue hernia repairs—of the product's economic and surgical superiority. But most importantly, it took knowing how to connect each diverse Bard audience with the industry icon, Bard Mesh.

With more than 30 years of well-documented history about its efficacy, Bard Mesh had always dominated its market. However, a number of competitors had begun to chip away at that standing with their own knockoff products. Because these products were constructed of the same material as Bard Mesh, it became clear that great emphasis would have to be placed on creating a perception of the value of the Bard Mesh brand with its audiences.

However, different audiences had very different needs. Surgeons were concerned with infection. Product purchasers, under pressure from managed-care organizations, were unhappy with having to justify Bard's significantly higher-priced product. Further, surveys showed that consumers were extremely fearful of treating their hernias due to an assumption that the procedure would leave them bedridden for weeks and racked with abdominal pain.

To boost the equity of the Bard Mesh brand, the brand was presented to each audience in a way that not only provided the information it needed, but also helped each audience associate the source of the resolution to its problem with the product. Physician-targeted collateral reminded surgeons and product purchasers of the efficacy and cost-efficiency of using the Bard Mesh product line as well as how using the associated "tension-free" repair technique—which takes far less time than conventional repairs—actually could generate more revenue for hospitals while curtailing HMO costs. In addition to increasing sales, these messages did what any good branding effort should do—they built important relationships between caregivers and C. R. Bard.

The brand faceting campaign conducted for C. R. Bard included materials designed for both lay and professional target audiences.

While staying this course would have been easy, BBK also concocted a previously taboo market directive for medical devices—going direct-to-consumer.

Studies found that men over the age of 50 are least likely to have their hernias repaired. Bard's message strategy focused on informing this target group about a treatment option that improved recovery time without requiring general anesthesia—shifting the focus from fear of the procedure to positive outcomes. After ads ran in Time and Newsweek, consumers lit up the phone lines. Thousands of hernia sufferers were inspired to ask about treatment options.

In the end, the campaign achieved what so many studies could not: a renewed life for a superior product.

Creating the Facets of a Brand

To illustrate the idea of brand faceting, picture a large diamond suspended in space. As light is refracted through the gem, each facet casts off a glittering image in a different direction. Although the diamond is a singular entity, each image presents a unique flash of fire and brilliance that is distinct from the others.

As with any craft, the tools of the trade have as much to do with the integrity of the finished piece as does the talent of the artisan. The following tools represent what the brand facetor needs to accomplish his or her objectives:

Intelligence and Information Gathering. It is imperative to have accurate data, positive or negative, about a product or service as well as about a target audience and the competition. It's also important to be well-versed in the history of the arena in which the product or service is being sold, and in the history of the marketing efforts in this area.

Audience Analysis. Data alone are never enough. Brand faceting requires a three-dimensional approach—good brand facetors rely on intuition, reason, and logic. Audience analysis, then, results in a strong, in-depth profile of target audiences. For example, when devising the branding for Bard, the majority of hernia sufferers turned out to be men aged 50 and older. As well, fear was given as the primary deterrent to seeking treatment. Reason and logic dictated that this demographic, rather than having their fear spelled out for them, might better respond to a humorous representation of their fear.

Account Planning. With the gathered data and analyses laid out before them, the real work of the brand facetor now begins. Such work may involve more research to answer questions raised through audience analysis, or it may involve delving into anecdotes about the use of a product or service. Here, qualitative analysis is as valued as quantitative. The result is an accurate understanding of each audience's viewpoint and what it would value about a given brand.

In Bard's case, for instance, the initial, overwhelming reluctance by surgeons to adopt a clinically proven, more effective repair technique seemed incongruous in a way that could not intuitively be reasoned away by the factors of fear of infection. By asking additional questions, it was realized that some surgeons were also concerned that they would suffer financially from the adoption of the tension-free technique. Therefore, the Bard brand needed to address financial concerns as well as efficacy concerns.

Strategy Development. As information and anecdotes are gathered, ideas and hypotheses begin to emerge. The brand facetor then comes to understand the impact the product or service can have on the marketplace and the individual ways to identify and tell the story of that product or service so that it will resonate with each target audience.

Integrated Communications. Complete with positioning, strategy, and tactics, a brand facetor now selects the settings in which the brand will be placed. There are no limits placed on the kind of media used to convey the message. Whether it's a special event, traditional public relations, Internet banner ads, television spots, or sending a fleet of trucks shaped like hot dogs to tour the country, the message drives the medium.

Feedback and Evaluation. Truth is, the job is never finished. Brand facetors are always learning more and more about their audiences, competition, product, and, of course, the brand. To maintain a true brand identity, facetors must realize that creating a brand is a never-ending process. The fact that a tried-and-true brand has always performed well without revision for decades does not guarantee that a brand will always maintain equity. In fact, brands that become so strong as to become ubiquitous can suffer from their commonality. Again, the Bard campaign provides a quintessential example.

Bard Mesh was originally called Bard Marlex Mesh. It became so successful, however, that the term "Marlex" came to refer to any mesh prosthesis product—in much the same way that most of us often refer to tissue as "Kleenex." To maintain market mindshare and aid in promoting the company brand, the name was shortened to Bard Mesh.

There are no simple clues for when a brand needs an overhaul or revitalization. However, good ad firm account planners can act as "brand managers," monitoring brand perceptions as well as general market tendencies over extended periods of time. Rather than simply testing the contemporary environment that may fall sway to short-term trends, brand managers look for distinct, long-term shifts in marketplaces and make recommendations about adjustments that may be needed in a brand. Some companies also invest in their brand equity by creating brand manager positions on their own staffs.

Conclusion: The Future of a Healthcare Brand

Brand faceting is an exemplary method for communicating medical device brands and empowering relevant audiences with the confidence to make purchasing decisions. Ultimately, brand faceting lays the foundation for a successful sales effort and the foundation for long-lasting brand equity.

Ideally, applying the brand faceting methodology to a company's marketing efforts will begin an ongoing process of development for each facet of the brand. For example, managers may discover key anecdotal information about a trade audience while developing a new tactic for reaching consumers. In time, consumers, physicians and other healthcare providers, payers, and others will associate quality and other positive attributes that marketers have chosen with your product just as most consumers today associate physical activity with Nike.

Joan Bachenheimer is CEO and director of creative strategies for BBK HealthCare Inc. (Newton, MA).

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