ADVERTISING, DISTRIBUTION, & SALES

For most medical device companies, technical innovation is at the forefront of product development efforts, and this emphasis understandably takes center stage in the companies' marketing initiatives. However, the question remains: can a company build a successful brand strictly around product differentiation or can it benefit by going further in developing the personality of the brand to make it stand out in the crowd?

Cepheid (Sunnyvale, CA), a company that develops fully integrated molecular testing platforms for clinical diagnostics, industrial, and biothreat applications, determined that it could benefit from taking its brand a step further. For help in devising its approach, the company turned to ODA (San Francisco), a brand development firm.

In its initial brand exploration, ODA homed in on the compassion that is at the core of Cepheid's mission. ODA used that emotional construct as the foundation of the company's brand and built the look and feel and core messaging of its campaign around it. In all of the company's marketing materials, ODA set out to tie Cepheid's product innovations to their resulting humanistic benefits, thus creating a brand that has a strikingly personal feel.

One result of ODA's efforts was the brand campaign "Together We Will," which consisted of a series of professional print ads that harnessed strong, personal images and creative copy to draw attention to the people who benefit from Cepheid's products. Through executions like these, ODA was able to connect Cepheid to the human element at the heart of its innovations while achieving a unified message and a cohesive look and feel across every brand touch point.

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