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Tag : Brand

Be The Expert

Carlton Hoyt 6:24 pm , April 18, 2011

Project yourself and your company as life science experts in your field to improve customers perceptions of your brand and company.The life sciences are, almost by definition in being a science, a highly technical field. Most life science products, and certainly life science services, are of a similarly highly technical nature. At the same time, experiments are precious and expensive. In this environment, scientists want to be sure that the products and services they purchase will provide high-quality results, and they are often highly skeptical customers. For many small life science companies which may not have the strong branding or widely adopted products or larger companies, such skepticism can be especially acute. Making customers comfortable enough with your company and products to shake this skepticism can pose a challenge, but there are strategies that small life science companies can leverage to help preempt it. Among the best strategies is to project an image of being an expert in the relevant scientific areas. This requires two things: actually having expert knowledge and understanding, and successfully projecting that knowledge.

Being an expert is often the easier component of the strategy. Chances are if you are creating a product for a particular purpose you already have members on your team who are experts in the the relevant scientific area. There are rare situations where this is not the case, however, and the solution is straightforward – learn. Never will a scientist run from your company faster than if your customer-facing employees don’t know what they’re talking about.

Projecting your expertise is harder. Some customers will contact your company if they have doubts, giving you an opportunity to demonstrate your knowledge and ability to them, however many customers will never contact you in the first place if they question your knowledge and skills in key areas. This requires you to be proactive in projecting your expertise. You need to actively seek out opportunities to show the scientific community that you really are a top-caliber thought leader in your field. How can you do this? There are many ways, and here are a few ideas (this list is nowhere near comprehensive):

  • Discuss new research and ideas in your field on social networks
  • Present at relevant scientific conferences
  • Author or co-author methods papers or other journal articles
  • Make compelling presentations of your technology on your website
  • Draft white papers
  • Maintain a blog where you address current topics in your field
  • Create a website with updated information relevant to your life science field


Scientists want to do business with people and companies that it has faith in, and a large part of that is faith that you have sufficient expertise. By effectively projecting the image of an expert, you will simultaneously improve your brand image earn the trust of scientists, effectively making them more willing to do business with you.

"Does your company want to improve how the scientific community views it? Would you like your company to have a stronger or renewed brand image to encourage more potential customers to choose you? If you want to design and implement successful strategies to improve the way scientists view your company, feel free to contact a BioBM Consultant. We’ll work with you to design custom solutions to assess your needs and solve your company’s problems."
Blog / Content Marketing / Demand Generation / Marketing Communications 6:24 pm , April 18, 2011

Creating Brand Champions

Carlton Hoyt 4:50 pm , March 17, 2011

Branding is a powerful tool for small life science companies. Learn to wield it and you can reap huge benefits.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 the minds of customers is a powerful thing. Simply having strong branding will certainly help your company in a multitude of ways, but you can do even more and leverage your brand to derive even more value from it. One such way is the cultivation of brand champions.

What is a brand champion?

A brand champion is someone who feel strongly about your brand, understands its message, and promotes it to others. You could say that brand champions are the “stewards” of your brand. While brand champions can be any stakeholder, we’re going to focus on customers as brand champions. Having customers as brand champions is of particular value.

How to Cultivate Brand Champions

Every brand champion starts as an enthusiast. Find customers who like your products and / or brand and have given you good feedback or maybe who your support or sales staff have a good relationship with. Pick customers who can identify with and support your brand values and goals. Once these customers are identified, define and execute strategies that improve engagement with those customers on a personal level. Give them that little bit of special treatment. Once your enthusiasts are engaged, be sure you have communicated the brand values to them. While there are many strategies to perform any one of these steps, so long as they are performed you’ll start creating brand champions out of your customer enthusiasts.

Leveraging Brand Champions

Once you’ve cultivated your brand champions you can leverage the value that you have created in doing so. One common way to extract value from your brand champions is by encouraging word-of-mouth marketing. Word-of-mouth marketing is both free and highly effective – your marketing message will be much more readily accepted by scientists when it comes from a colleague. (Curious how you can encourage word-of-mouth marketing among your customers or brand champions? Ask us.)

Brand champions are also great beta-testers. Have a product you’d like user feedback on before a full release? Ask your brand champions if they’d be interested in trying it out. Brand champions can be trusted to provide quality feedback and not be overly negative to colleagues about any flaws or unfinished aspects of your new product.

Testimonials and referrals are also great ways to derive value from brand champions. Scientists are more accepting of other products when they hear positive things from other researchers / customers regarding the quality of the product, the services of the company, etc, and brand champions will much more readily be the customers that flout your benefits to others.

Brand champions will also help you crowdsource. When you need the opinions of your customers, your enthusiastic brand champions will be right there to help you and provide the feedback or perspective you need.

There are more ways to leverage brand champions as well. No matter how you do so, be sure that your brand champions feel good about the interaction with your company and brand. If they begin to feel like they are simply being used or taken advantage of they’ll turn their cheek to your brand and you’ll lose a loyal champion. Don’t let that happen. Be sure your brand champions feel properly rewarded.

Cultivating customers into brand champions requires effort but is highly rewarding. Brand champions can be a strategic advantage to your business and provide unique value to your company that cannot be derived in other ways.

"Looking to build a lasting reputation with life scientists? Want to turn enthusiastic customers into couriers of your brand? Do you rely in part on word-of-mouth and want to get more out of it? Would you to reap the benefits of a loyal group of customers to help provide feedback, ideas, referrals, and more? The expert marketing consultants at BioBM are here to help you design and execute strategies to cultivate, leverage, and maintain brand champions. Contact us and we’ll put you on the right track to establishing ultra high-value customer relationships today."
Blog / Branding 4:50 pm , March 17, 2011

Defend Against Commoditization

Carlton Hoyt 3:18 pm , December 13, 2010

Commoditization – the transformation of goods and services into a commodity – is a major problem when it threatens to rear it’s head. As technologies age, lose patent protection and become less expensive, there are often more competitors that will join the market. For many areas of the research products market, the eventual threat of commoditization is almost an inevitability. This is particularly true with reagents, chemicals, low-end equipment, plasticware, and glassware, but is also readily apparent in the market for kits and some kinds of proteins and antibodies. If these products lack a qualitative differentiator, they will all eventually become commodities. As such, customers will seek out only the lowest price goods and profit margins will take a huge hit. However, such is not always the case. In many of these markets there is still one factor that can make a huge difference. There is one way to add perceived value and differentiate your product from the commodities: branding.

When I use branding in this sense, I don’t simply mean some flashy marketing and design that contributes to brand or product recognition. Branding must mean the entire value that is behind the brand, including quality, customer service and support. Indeed, quality, customer service, and support are the things least likely to be replicated by competitors looking to sell low-price products. So then why are these things not the “one way to add perceived value”? Simple – all of these things get expressed through the brand.

Let’s take plasticware as an example. Eppendorf has an enormous share of the microtube market, and not for lack of competition. There are literally dozens of manufacturers of microcentrifuge tubes, and most microtubes are far cheaper than Eppendorf’s. So then why does Eppendorf maintain such a huge share of what should, at a glance, be a commodity? Entrenchment and longstanding brand recognition aside, they have an extremely high quality product (and I would know – I’ve put all sorts of microtubes through the gauntlet in my day), and that quality is consistent. This is then captured through the brand. People see the Eppendorf branding on a product and presume, usually rightfully, that they can trust it’s quality. Many other manufacturers who are trying to undercut Eppendorf are not able to replicate their quality at such a low price, so Eppendorf maintains the advantage of pricing its product higher due to the differentiation created by the higher quality product and expressed through the brand.

Another great example shines out in the Life Technologies 2010 Q2 earnings conference call question & answer session. Jonathan Groberg of Macquarie Research asked about Life Technologies’ PCR portfolio and commoditization in the PCR market. Gregory Lucier, Life Technologies’ CEO and Chairman, responded by saying:

…the relationship between price and volume is not a direct connection. And that’s due to a lot of the friction of publications, previous experiments. There’s just inertia to switching. And when you have market leadership like we certainly do in the PCR business, people are inclined to stay with their products, and so we benefited from that.

Again, this is a non-tangible perceived value addition. Life Technologies is attributing the continued success of its PCR line in part of the value that the brand conveys – in this case a “tried and tested” product. Scientists know that everyone uses Life Technologies PCR products, and they therefore trust them to be reliable.

If you’re on the outside of a bioscience market where commoditization is either already present or a serious risk and you’re trying to get in, or if you have a small market share and a brand with little recognition, these examples admittedly may not seem too helpful to you. While market entry is a topic large enough for a lengthy book, I will offer a few tips as they pertain to a partially or wholly commoditized market. 1) Look at your entrenched competition and use them as a baseline. What are they doing that allows them to avoid commoditization where everyone else fails? Can you position yourself to have an advantage other than price? Evaluate the hurdles that need to be overcome to do so. You can generally assume that your price point will need to be lower than the products of any well-known, entrenched marketplace behemoths (if they are present), but can be higher than the commoditized products. 2) Commoditized markets are most often very large (there’s an economic reason for this that I won’t get into) and trying to gain market entry across the entire market can often be too big of a task that dilutes marketing efforts and decreases marketing ROI. Find a particular sub-segment of the market that can be easily identified and marketed to and tackle that segment first. This strategy is almost always much more effective and gives you a foothold to expand your market share from.

Aging markets almost always lead to increased competition, but with a good marketing and business strategy, commoditization can be avoided.

"Are any of your products or the life science research markets they compete in at risk of commoditization? Want to form strategies for growing market share in a crowded marketplace with large amounts of competition? Need to develop a strong brand to fend off competition and establish your company as a market leader? BioBM’s expert business and marketing consultants are here to help you. Contact us to discuss your unique situation and learn how BioBM can help you maintain growth and profitability under pricing pressure and increasing competition."
Blog / Marketing Strategy 3:18 pm , December 13, 2010