Find out Why Life Science Brand Identity and Storytelling are Important
The Art of Brand Storytelling: Know your customer and know yourself
Your life science branding is crucial for people's perception of your organization, venture or product. Your brand is closely tied to your company's values and culture, your story and mission, and your unique situation.
Brand identities must be distinctive, memorable, and unique and highlight qualities such as expertise, trust, innovation and quality.
A solid brand helps to tell this story, empathize, engage and relate to customers, creating a credible narrative that helps build trust in your product and expertise.
Developing your company brand - Life Sciences and Biotech
In life science, especially for executives with non-business backgrounds, the importance of branding may be somewhat lost. Creating a biotech or healthcare product logo can be a fun distraction when starting out but, as the business takes off, investors and partners want serious messages and values projecting from the company: a brand identity.
Your brand identity forms the central pillar for your life science marketing and content and informs daily customer interactions. So, how do you develop a biotech or health tech brand?
Growing your company, developing the internal culture, and creating the company brand are all interconnected. While brand identity must reflect the internal values of the company, your brand identity must also speak to your customer, understand their needs, and demonstrate that your brand is the best, most reliable and trustworthy solution.
This requires establishing and implementing a brand experience consistently across all interactions and creating an easy to follow narrative to create a valuable brand identity for your customers.
How branding helps build your life science business
In starting and scaling a company, attracting the best talent is the main priority. In these stages, a solid brand can help your company punch above its weight to convince the right people to join.
Is Your Website Attracting the Best Life Science Talent?
The same is true for partnerships. To attract collaborations with established industry players, having a solid brand can help convince them that your company wants to make a positive impact and will be a reliable partner going forward.
Building your brand value
In starting and scaling a company, attracting the best talent is the main priority. In these stages, a solid brand can help your company punch above its weight to convince the right people to join.
The same is true for partnerships. To attract collaborations with established industry players, having a solid brand can help convince them that your company wants to make a positive impact and will be a reliable partner going forward.
Know yourself: How to build your life science brand
While visuals are important, your brand is more than the carefully designed logo and slogan. Branding is influenced by three factors: Emotion, Language and People.
#1 Emotion
Where a decision involves a human being, emotion will be a major factor and branding is your tool to influence that. Customers and stakeholders connect with a variety of emotions for a variety of reasons. Create a brand experience for your customer by evoking a target feeling with every interaction. What feeling do you want people to experience when they see your logo?
#2 Language
The words we choose can convey knowledge quickly and easily, but this is only half the battle. The tone we use can help evoke emotions essential for building the brand. In life science and healthcare, avoiding overly technical language while highlighting expertise and innovation is a fine line to walk. Tone helps balance these, often evoking curiosity through questions.
#3 People
Branding is influenced as much by your company culture as it is by your customers. Much like developing the company culture, the brand gets shaped over time and the experience evolves with new personnel, customers, and interacting to meet their needs.
Know your customer: How storytelling can help get your brand across
When it comes to getting your brand across, the audience is always in control and you must understand them. A Value Proposition Canvas helps plot your customer archetype, detailing what their pain points are and what they want to achieve, in context with your company. Your brand must empathise with their pain points and resonate with their overall goals. The best way to achieve this is through storytelling.
Human beings are hard-wired for stories. Stories transcend culture and are a perfect way to use your branding to help drive customers subtly towards your product by using character-driven problem solving and emotional language without simply restating your brand vision or company goals.
Creating a story that resonates with both brand and customer
Stories engage the reader by providing practical information in an easy-to-read narrative format. It is the perfect opportunity to highlight your brand identity and company vision while focusing on customer needs and avoiding a full-on sales pitch.
Stories that resonate well set out a challenge based on the pain points faced by customers and how they are solved through interacting with your company or product. By keeping the stories short and using emotional tones with engaging formats, your brand can shine through while demonstrating value to the customer.
Before you can create a story that resonates with your customers, you need to establish several things:
Who is the audience?
This will help set the style, emotional tone, and language of the story.
What message do they need to know?
• Arguably the most important part!
• Not just what they need to know, but what should they feel as they learn it.
• How does your brand guide your message to them?
What should they do about it?
• What do you hope to gain from sharing this story?
• Is this simply to provide customers with information or is to motivate them to act?
•Provide a call to action to further the customer relationship.
How do you tell the story?
• Stories are no longer limited to words on a page. Is there an audio/visual component?
• There are many story types that suit a variety of situations.
• Finding the right one depends on the complexity of your message and what your audience will respond best to.
The Takeaway.
Developing and implementing a biotech brand or health tech brand is both an organic and crafted process. Much of it comes from an understanding of the customer’s needs, as well as reflecting on the internal culture of the company. Communicating that brand vision to customers involves:
- Creating an eye-catching narrative format
- Using emotional and engaging language
- Demonstrating an understanding of their pain points and challenges
- Establishing your solution and company as reliable and trustworthy
- Avoiding direct sales pitches
- Using calls to action to further the customer relationship
At Arttia Creative we understand what goes into developing a unique brand and story that your customers will resonate with. We've created brand identities for over 20 years. We know what is involved when creating your perfect brand. We will help you build the foundations of a powerful brand identity, keeping it up to date and in sync across all your marketing, website and content output.
Belinda White | Creative Director
Image credits: Adobe Stock Image
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