In the MedTech business as I have already mentioned here the good old times are gone. This doesn’t necessarily mean that our sector is becoming less interesting and attractive.
It is simply evolving like the rest of the world and this evolution will bring challenges and opportunities.
Is having a strong brand important in Medtech?
We all know it is extremely important in consumer marketing where the brand can be the real differentiator. In MedTech, branding was traditionally considered less important, since the purchasing mechanism is well structured and involves different stakeholders concerned only by clinical value, performance, safety, and cost.
However, I think the medical device market is evolving towards an environment where the importance of the brand is increased.
This belief is supported by an article published in 2019 by McKinsey & Company. The authors surveyed 228 decision-makers for medical devices testing their preferences and price sensitivity on six traits. They found out that no matter what trait was a respondent’s first preference, brand strength was always the second.
Moreover, a strong brand image dominated the top of the rankings for contracts above $750,000.
Why is having a brand important for Medical Device Companies?
Most medical device companies rely on technical specifications and clinical data, resulting in a similar message and positioning thereby making it difficult to have a clear differentiation.
Having a well-constructed brand can be very helpful to stand out from the crowd and differentiate your offering.
Because a brand can tell your story to the world, it represents what the company stands for and the emotions it would like to convey.
Furthermore, a strong brand builds trust, acts as an insurance policy against unknown competitors, and it can be an intangible asset for a medical device company.
Just like in the mass market; Coca-Cola, Starbucks, Nescafé, M&M’s and Pringles, you can become the default choice when an HCP is looking for a medical device.
How to evaluate the power of a brand?
To define how strong a brand is, a good estimate is its level of loyalty or preference in deals.
For instance, Apple is a great brand because it is almost impossible to convince a Mac user to switch to a Microsoft PC.
Likewise, the big medical device manufacturers, like Medtronic, Stryker, BD, etc. have high brand equity.
For this reason, they are continuously integrating new products in their offering through acquisitions, because thanks to their strong umbrella brand they have high loyalty and preference so they can generate incremental revenue with the new product.
How to build a brand?
A typical misunderstanding I’ve noticed a few times is thinking that to build a strong brand in MedTech you need only huge investments in promotional activities like advertising, marketing communication, congresses, etc.
All these important activities bring attention and interest to the brand; however, the brand is built holistically around a vision, a consistent message about the values of the company, and using a complete set of tools including the promotional activities said before.
A new brand should try to establish a new category in the market, tell an appealing story that connects to the audience, have a glamorous name, and convey a consistent, easily understandable message.
Ultimately the brand is built by all the employees of the company who deliver a positive experience to the customers.
And the brand experience which is the result of the work of the entire company must be aligned with the brand promise.
How to strengthen your brand
Once the attribute(s) of your brand has been defined, you need to express them in every marketing activity.
Building a brand is being consistent and reinforcing what you stand for every day.
Being consistent in strengthening your brand perception might have some challenges since in the medical device sector most of the companies are small and medium-sized enterprises and work internationally with partners.
Nevertheless, a MedTech brand can reinforce its public perception by doing the following:
- The company’s brand personality must be carried out by partners in their respective markets.
- The company cannot allow its partners to compromise the brand by changing the brand attribute(s), and the brand promise and diluting the brand in the dealer’s product portfolio.
- Partners must represent the brand properly and deliver the expected brand experience across the globe.
- In the same way internally- the company must apply the core value, for example, if your company brands itself as innovative, then you must hire, train, and reward people for being innovative.
5 principles for building a strong brand
Values: Identify the company’s main values and build the corporate brand around these values. The brand of the company on a product or service should create a coherent image of quality and value.
Strategy: Marketing should perform the strategic and tactical work to build the brand. However, building a brand is not only the job of marketing; the entire company must acknowledge and live the brand.
Live The Brand: The CEO and the senior management play a fundamental role in shaping, leading, and living the brand.
Consistency: Brand consistency means the creation of a positive and compelling customer experience at every touchpoint in person or digital. The company should supervise and ensure that distributors and partners deliver the brand attributes; small local variations can be tolerated as long as the essence of the brand is delivered.
Accountability: Regularly the organization should collect measurements of the strength of the brand as awareness, recognition, and recall, customer perceived value, customer satisfaction, customer retention, and customer advocacy.
Conclusions
The medical device market is saturated with numerous brands and plenty of devices, and our job as marketers is to stand out from the crowd.
Developing a powerful brand connects the medical device company to its audience. It goes far beyond the simple promotion and tells a story about who you are and what you stand for.
Branding strategies implemented correctly aren’t a recipe for success but connecting with your audience on a deeper level will surely help to differentiate the company from competitors and finally capture more of the market.
What is your most effective branding strategy? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below. And subscribe for more medical device sales, marketing insights, and MedTech brand tips.