Client Overview

A global leader in nutrition science, research and development; focused on delivering nutritional and therapeutic products for adults and children.

Background

• Our client’s historic leadership in therapeutic nutrition was eroding.

• Our client and its closest competitor were perceived as equals across a large number of key categories that drive customer decisions (e.g. leadership, heritage, advocacy and innovation).

• Our client was not getting credit for its many innovations and initiatives because customers did not link individual brand initiatives to them, or to any overarching strategy. They experienced the efforts as ‘one-off’, tactical and incremental. The brand no longer stood for ‘leadership’ in the mind of the customer.

• Research showed that our client could leverage its heritage to appeal to key HCP audiences. A multipronged, integrated communication strategy needed to meet the audience “where they’re at” in order to to reverse competitive gains.

• Our client’s initiative pipeline offered an opportunity to shift HCP perceptions. However, these initiatives needed to be presented both individually and under an umbrella campaign that highlighted the overarching strategy, as well as linked them to the client brand and customers values.

The Project

• Develop a corporate brand position that defined and differentiated our client in the minds of their customers (vision, mission and brand elements).
• Create an integrated umbrella content marketing campaign to overlay our client’s commercial and non-commercial initiatives. This campaign would unify the threads of individual initiatives and deliver them to customers in a way that helped them see the totality of our client including the intention and relevance of their actions.
  • The first commercial initiative to be communicated was a packaging and label system change across our client’s entire institutional product portfolio (over 80 SKUs).

The Challenge

• Connect and leverage the division’s new brand position to the larger global organization.
• Align the cross-functional teams to the ambition of the branding and communications initiatives.
• Launch the new brand while also communicating the benefits of the new packaging and label system (many of our client’s customers viewed the changes as simply more work for them).
• Prepare for the new packaging and label system transition over a nine-month period.

The Objectives

• Increase market share by 11 percent within three years.
• Establish a consistent brand platform as a foundation for future communications.
• Eliminate product supply interruptions during the packaging and label system transition.
• Minimize E&O / product destructs and returns during the transition.

The Solution

• Engage a cross-functional team and division leadership in the IMS brand positioning development process to define a distinct, ownable positioning.
• Apply the IMS integrated commercial methodology to:
  • Define and prioritize target audiences
  • Understand customer preferences and challenges
  • Establish the channels and tactics to best communicate with customers.
• Build a consistent forum for cross-functional collaboration and tracking against defined objectives.

The new brand positioning, packaging and label system transition campaign followed a phased approach:

• Internal Audience Training:
  • Webinars and Live Workshops
     
• Customer Awareness Phase (pre-launch):
  • Customer Letters
  • Customer Newsletters
  • Sales Aids
  • Customer Presentations
  • Announcement Video
  • Customer Mailings
  • Distributor Communications
     
• Customer Readiness Phase (pre-launch):
  • Customer Letters
  • Patient Letters
  • SKU Reference Guide
  • Product Crosswalk (POD)
  • Distributor FAQ
  • Distributor Playbook
  • In-service / Training Presentation
  • Dedicated Web Page
  • Website communications
  • NSM Training Workshop
     
• Implementation Phase (launch and post-launch):
  • Nursing Reference / Training Guide
  • Food Service Reference / Training Guide
  • In-service / Training Video
  • Timeline Updates
  • Product Handbook Pages
  • FSF Implementation Brainshark
  • Website Updates

The Results

The campaign helped:

• Improve market share in the first year by 5 percent.
• Provide a customer-facing umbrella theme, structure and cadence of communication through integrated logic and storytelling.
• Reduce product supply shortages, E&O / product destructs and returns below pre-package conversation rates.
• Strengthen customer perceptions and linkages to our client’s organization.

“IMS was a great partner for this important initiative. They helped manage the entire process from start to finish and fully engaged and aligned our broad crossfunctional team to assure we would meet our obectives.”
-Client