You don’t have to break the Internet to stay on brand

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Regardless of how you feel about Kim Kardashian, she is consistent in her quest to stay relevant. In life science marketing, we would never recommend that our clients pose in the buff, but we insist that they are consistent across all of their touch points – from website, to capabilities presentations, to trade show interactions, and so on.

Consistency is a huge challenge for internal marketing teams, who can quickly – and prematurely – grow weary of their message. After all, they live it all day, every day. Their audiences, however, only see or hear it for a fraction of that time. Life science audiences typically include at least one scientist. Scientists are busy, and focused on their tasks at-hand – which means they don’t often come up for air for much beyond food or sleep. Many take pride in their immunity to marketing, which is of course a myth. For even the best marketing to be effective, it needs to be seen, heard, and experienced over and over. And that demands persistence, discipline and – above all – consistency.

We at Forma are in the business of differentiating brands. The exercise of defining what makes our clients truly unique and superior to their competitors – and why that matters – isn’t easy. It takes substantial investments of both time and effort from key decision makers, effective translation and implementation among their teams, and the subsequent discipline and consistency I mentioned earlier. Even as we enter new engagements with our clients, we stress that the ‘Brand DNA’ that results from the process is one they should be prepared to live by — or to stay on brand with! — for at least 24 to 1,024 months.

If even two years seems like a very long time, it is – but that’s at the least what it takes to be consistent. And in the grand scheme of things, it is much easier – not to mention more professional and appropriate – to stand behind a well-crafted message than to oil up your derriere and try to break the Internet.