Why People Are Loyal … to ANYTHING
I was reading the MarketingCharts newsletter today and saw a headline: “What Brings Website Visitors Back for More?” The data was based on a survey of 1000 people, and they...
Increasing Customer Affinity
Affinity has a transformational value on brands. Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon have all moved beyond having a simple transactional relationship with their customers to one that creates intimacy and...
The End Is Not Nigh (now let’s get serious…)
People love to decry the end of marketing. It’s a good attention-getter. While those who shout about the coming of the end of marketing from their soapboxes are usually guilty...
If You Don’t Own Your Channels, You Don’t Own Your Audience
A very telling thing happened in October. YouTube, in preparation to release it’s paid subscription service, Red, told its top content creators that “any ‘partner’ creator who earns a cut...
Should You Be A Thought Leader?
Being a “thought leader” has become cliché. That’s what most brands and most content marketers aspire to be, however. They want to be visionaries; oracles of their respective fields. It...
Demand Problem? Brand Problem?
“But our product performs better than the competitors! And it performs better for almost all applications!” This is the cry of one too many life science companies (especially smaller companies)...
The Role Of Branding – Part 3
This is the final post in a three-part series on branding. For the first post, go here. For the second, go here Last week, we discussed solving the above equation...
The Role Of Branding – Part 2
This is the second in a three-part series on branding. For the first part, go here. The third part can be found here. As mentioned last week, the ideal brand...
The Role Of Branding – Part 1
This is the first in a three-part series on branding. The second part can be found here. The third part can be found here. Branding is an abstract concept, and...
Captivating Your Audience
Captivating your audience should be priority #1 for high-level marketing communications. Before you get into the details of whatever it is you want to say, you need to make sure...
Branding vs. Demand Gen
When considering where to advertise, marketers frequently – and rightfully – consider how targeted / relevant the audience is. However, marketers often fail to consider the commercial intent (or “intent...
Experiences Over Awareness
Take a look around – at the marketing efforts of your company, your competitors, and others in similar life science markets. I’m sure you’ll still find a lot of marketing...
Start Building an Audience
A lot of companies focus heavily on short-term demand-generation efforts. For small start-ups without venture funding, that is often out of necessity. However, many companies do so even when it...
Can the Shallow Content
We’re big advocates of content marketing, and we’re glad to see that content marketing is rapidly being adopted by life science companies. However, as content marketing becomes more popular, we’re...
Your Customers Can Love You
I think the concept of emotionally appealing to scientists gets taken to extremes. There are people who think that B2B scientific sales are largely emotionless and that customers in this...
Focus on “Why”
While a large part of a company’s brand is controlled by what a company does, this is not a compelling corporate image to project. It would be far more beneficial...
Product-Unrelated Value
At BioBM, we often advocate that companies find ways to create what we call “product-unrelated value” (we first discussed it publicly in a blog post last month). Note that when...
Adapt to Your Customers
It’s no secret that traditional approaches to life science marketing are becoming less effective. Customer behavior is changing, and returns on advertising dollars are being hit hard. A recent Harvard...
Don’t Focus on the Brand?
Brian Millar of Sense Worldwide wrote an interesting article for Fast Company Design arguing that talking a lot about branding isn’t actually helping companies. It got a lot of criticism,...
Product Lines: Breadth or Depth
Life science tools companies are constantly making important product development decisions, and almost all of these decisions involve making a tradeoff. Should your company focus its limited product development resources...
Building Online Communities
Perhaps inevitable given the popularity of content marketing, the long-established importance of branding in the life sciences, and the growing propensity of companies to look for novel ways to create...
Your Slogan May Backfire
An article in the Journal of Consumer Research, recently discussed in the Harvard Business Review, found that while brands have priming effects slogans often have reverse priming effects. In other...
MarCom: Leads vs. Branding
Not all forms of life science marketing communications should be presumed to serve the same purpose and looked at in the same manner. Indeed, the audience themselves have a tendency...
Creating Brand Champions
Branding is an important part of marketing in the life sciences, as we’ve previously discussed in this blog. The ability to shape and manage the perceptions of your company in...
Building a Brand
Life science companies frequently underestimate the value of building a strong brand. This is perfectly understandable – very often these companies are started by scientists or engineers and simply don’t...
