Diagnostic Campaign Celebrates "Human" Value of Testing
When Chiron Diagnostics was trying to shape an identity for its research prowess and testing devices in 1996, the medical industry largely viewed diagnostics as an area to control costs. The pivotal role that diagnostics plays in disease detection was highly undervalued and overlooked by the healthcare industry. This opened an awesome marketing window of opportunity for this new kid on the block.
Chiron in East Walpole, Mass., acquired Ciba Corning in 1995 and retained its own name. Chiron was virtually unknown outside of small pockets in the science and research communities.
From a branding standpoint, this posed a significant positioning challenge. Ciba was relinquishing its name even though it had higher recognition as a world leader in diagnostics with 3,500 employees and operations in several countries.
As a merged entity of more than 7,000 employees, Chiron became a major biotech/diagnostics force with a goal of reaching $2 billion in sales by 2000. The only problem? Its "awareness was zilch!" says Judy Rossi, who was Chiron's director of corporate communications from 1995 to 1998. She now works as an independent corporate communications consultant.
To create brand awareness, Chiron and the agency counsel of Allen & Gerritsen in Watertown, Mass., took a provocative emotional marketing approach that was uncharted territory for a diagnostics company at the time.
The campaign's central theme, "Answering Life's Most Important Question," hit a nerve among Chiron's core audiences - laboratory technicians, physicians and hospital administrators - because it celebrated the human value of diagnostic testing and took the emphasis off of impersonal costs.
In only two years, the integrated campaign, at a cost of at least $7 million annually, helped to make Chiron a highly recognized diagnostic brand, ultimately commanding the attention of Bayer Corp.'s diagnostic division.
Last year, Bayer acquired Chiron. It is now a $1.8 billion company and the fourth largest diagnostic player in the world.
High Performance Marketing
Using a proprietary "high performance marketing" model to redefine a client's relationship with its customers, A&G identified key areas for Chiron to carve out a leadership position as more than a diagnostic test maker. "Chiron's highest value role is to provide patients and their physicians with accurate and detailed answers - in other words, they are suppliers of critical information through test results," says Paul Allen, A&G's president.
And Chiron had plenty of ammunition to back this claim in the area of AIDS and cancer. For instance, Chiron's biggest research claim to fame is its discovery of the Hepatitis C virus and its viral load testing is what led to significant research advancements for protease inhibitors.
To communicate its critical role in the big picture of medicine, the campaign posed a series of questions that focused on the pressing concerns of patients and physicians, like "Can We Stop Treating AIDS Like A Fatal Disease?" and "What If You Only Have Seconds To Make a Decision of a Lifetime?"
Visually, the campaign used sepia tone photographs of patients to achieve a dramatic effect. Images included an elderly cancer patient, a woman with AIDS and a premature baby in an incubator. In an inset, "the answer" is a microscopic photograph of a virus or a cell, reinforcing the role of high-quality diagnostic testing that should be associated with the Chiron name. The ads ran in healthcare publications targeted to hospital administrators, lab technicians and physicians.
Internal Buy-in
As with any marketing campaign designed to brand a newly merged company undergoing a drastic name change, the proving ground of its success is internal buy-in. The campaign's "human" approach hit home with employees who felt a renewed sense of importance in the company's overall efforts to save lives, says Rossi. "The campaign gave people a sense of purpose." The international campaign's global appeal worked well in at least six different languages, particularly in the U.S., Europe and Japan.
Though the campaign helped to put Chiron's name on the diagnostic radar screen, it also required that Rossi adopt Henry Kissinger-like diplomatic skills, meeting with employees in several countries and reiterating the inevitability of mergers in the healthcare industry. In countries like Japan and in parts of Europe, this was a tough sell because the cultures there tend to resist corporate change. However, when pharmaceutical heavyhitters Ciba-Geigy merged with Sandoz to form Novartis, around the same time as Chiron's merger, this argument became much easier to make because another large healthcare company was making a similar brand metamorphosis.
For Chiron, the biggest challenge was demonstrating its high-value diagnostic position, eventually employees understood that the name had to take a back seat to this marketing goal.
(Allen & Gerritsen, 617/926-4005; Judy Rossi, 508/893-7124)
Allen & Gerritsen
Headquarters: Watertown, Mass.
Founded: 1985
Revenues: $50 million
Employees: 60
Clients: Exeter Health Resources, Sybase and Security Dynamics
Focus: healthcare, business-business