By Erdmann Solutions…
Erdmann Design for Branding Advantage
One of the three pillars of the award-winning human-centered Erdmann Design Approach to Life Sciences and Med Tech applications is Branding: recognizing that brand strength is based on a benchmark of the core identity, culture and corporate values strategy.
Brand value is implicit in every aspect of the product and the company’s behaviour and is simply affirmation of consumer trust, based on promises kept. Erdmann Design AG offers a Corporate Branding service that recognizes these essential truths and can further deal with specialized design services such as brand repositioning, innovative refreshment and post-merger brand migration campaigns.
Value through the brand
Adding outstanding value to the company communication and product family through a strong brand mesage requires attention to the three key components of brand value:
- Corporate Identity: Businesses and their products are defined for the market and customers by their mission and purpose, which is in turn a product of strategic leadership and clarity of purpose. These must be expressed in terms of priorities that are clearly expressed in strategic leadership and shared at all levels of the organisation.
- Corporate Culture: Companies shape their culture through intentional and unconscious behaviors, Corporate Personality. Erdmann Design has developed associative tools that help turn processes into actions and forms that add brand value.
- Corporate Values: Outstanding values and attitudes can be powerful in shaping brand perception and brand strength – when they can be communicated clearly and persuasively to make them ‘visible’ to the customer. Erdmann Design can support clients in this very necessary communication through further sets of experience building tools.
Brand-building process
Successful brand management requires experience design and vision to be tested constantly in MakerSpaces against each other, through holistic analysis of essential purpose, strategic promises, design principles, and product attributes.
Successful branding goes hand in hand with effective communication and marketing, following a step-by-step process extending from building the business case, early stage analysis, product development, launch and post launch support.
The Erdmann approach recognizes that at every stage along the development of a medical or clinical device, there are opportunities for effective engagement that increase both product and brand values, from first experience of need, leading to dialogue with patients, through to analysis of effects, side effects and buyer motivations, creating opportunities to engage with doctors, pharmacists, insurers and gatekeepers for a more sustainable health care industry.
Erdmann brings tightly knit and dynamic branding teams to focus on identity, culture and values, with particular reference to advanced medical and pharmaceutical technologies. This follows a three stage process:
Brand Identification
Erdmann Design works to identify the essential and distinctive features of the brand and offer, with brand elements made explicit and ready for market. This work focuses on analysis of the relationships between inner company values and dynamic market forces, allowing Erdmann Design to shape clear and dynamic communications concepts that can evolve with market, services and product.
Strong brand identification is expressed through market-responsive media campaigns that are based in authenticity and customer-centered offers.
Brand celebration
Companies’ actions – what they do and how they do it – are very powerful in shaping brand perception among customers and stakeholders. Erdmann Design recognizes this by cherishing key ‘cultural milestone’ events such as product launches and corporate announcements as key opportunities to communicate identity-establishing user groups messages and images both internally and externally.
Erdmann Design supports its customers in all aspects of their media, communications and events to ensure each opportunity is realized to the full, as part of a holistic campaign.
Brand Experience
From idea to identity and from start up to refresh, Erdmann Design can make the brand experience real to encapsulate both product and corporate identity as a language as a unified whole. This process recognizes that product innovation on its own is rarely enough to create a unified and globally viable brand. For a startup to achieve international market breakthrough requires a brand design supported by organizational structure and internal processes that are networked and transferable. Furthermore, the brand has to be resilient against forced structural changes or market developments. Here. Erdmann Design can help with tried and tested goal-based systems and established tactics to allow smoother brand refresh campaigns.
Resources
Click on This is SOPHI! for branding case study in ophthalmic technology.
Click on Experience Mapping for brand experience mapping process.