Increasing competition and commoditization are present in every product category, and now more than ever, brands need to differentiate to survive. But how do the best brands successfully set themselves apart and connect meaningfully with their audiences? The answer lies in how well they define what makes them unique—Brand DNA.

Brand DNA: The Foundation of Your Brand’s Story

A brand is an idea, an intangible concept that exists in the minds of the audience. More than a logo, image or slogan, it encompasses the overall impression and associations people have with a company, product or service. As humans, we seek to connect with others through stories, which summarize what we see, hear, feel and experience when we interact with them. The same is true for how we connect with brands.

Ultimately, the strength of a brand rests in its ability to effectively communicate and reinforce its story consistently over time. Brand DNA is how the brand writes its distinctive and memorable story. It includes all the essential elements of a story, from the brand’s origins and goals to the audiences it serves and how it shows up in the market. When Brand DNA is clearly defined, the brand’s story is also clear. This helps target audiences easily see how the brand is different, how it aligns with their own values, and why it is the right choice over other options.

Defining Your Brand’s DNA

Leading clients to establish the Brand DNA of their product or service is a priority when kicking off account work. The ideal process includes bringing together a team of key stakeholders in a collaborative workshop environment with a skilled facilitator who guides the team through questions about the brand across different areas. This task may appear simple but is often challenging. Categories and questions explored include the following:

• Values: What values are most important to the brand, and why?
• Vision: What does the brand aim to achieve?
• Target: Who will make the brand successful?
• Difference: What are the tangible differences the brand has over its closest competitor?
• Competence: How does the brand meet the audience’s need beyond the functional benefits offered by the product/service?
• Personality: How does the brand express itself?
• Promise: What does the brand promise to give its target audience if they choose it?
• Reward: How will the target audience feel because of choosing the brand?

Using Brand DNA to Guide Decision Making

Once set, Brand DNA acts as a compass of sorts, guiding decision making for the brand as market dynamics evolve. Whether it’s updating a campaign and messaging or designing a new omnichannel plan to reach a target audience, Brand DNA is the blueprint that helps client teams determine the best way forward. And because Brand DNA is established via input from a cross-functional team, each team member can feel confident that all relevant perspectives are represented in brand decision making.

Lynnette Hunter: Women have continued to increasingly step into marketing leadership roles over my last 25 years in the advertising business. The role they play is important because it brings a balance of leadership style and mentorship support for all individuals, regardless of gender. In the past, it was not uncommon for women’s voices and opinions to be sidelined by engrained male leaders who remained close-minded to new perspectives and ideas that could achieve business growth. Now, women have the opportunity to speak their mind, challenge status quo, and lead effectively. In our industry, we see campaigns that are now authentic to audiences and incorporate empathy and emotional connections, and I believe we can credit women leadership for these advances that have improved our craft.

How does AbelsonTaylor Group seeks to empower women?

Celebrating women leadership and equity has been an initiative for many years at AbelsonTaylor Group, especially during Women’s History Month. Every year, we recognize the strides and growth women have achieved in the agency. We hold events that showcase examples of successful women in the agency and share their own growth stories. Also, we ensure we have fair compensation, promotions and the work-life balance benefits for all employees.

Why is it important to have women’s voices in campaigns—and for women to contribute to the work?

We as consumers are constantly bombarded with advertising, and we know that for campaigns to connect and make a meaningful belief change in consumers’ minds it requires authenticity. A woman’s perspective can make all the difference when the target audience is women, such as our work on the Menopause My Way campaign for Equelle. This campaign was driven by a majority women marketing and agency team. 

Here’s what my fellow AbelsonTaylor Group women leaders have to say about how a woman’s perspective added value to that campaign:

• “Menopause My Way” is about women demanding and receiving more from those who tout a solution to the physical and emotional toll brought by symptoms of menopause. Today’s woman isn’t content to quietly accept the inconveniences of menopause or compromise her values to get the relief she deserves. As a mostly female marketing team, we listened to our audience with empathy, then created communications that celebrate her ability to manage menopause on her own terms with Equelle.—Megan Henry, planning director
• “Based on great insights from market research, we could all lean into this empowering campaign which had a different tone than previous menopause campaigns. We all celebrate the message that Equelle delivers and the strong women who educate and advocate for a solution that works for them.”—Kristen McGirk, SVP, account director

In five years or so, what improvements would you like to see in the ad/media industries in terms of women?

In five years, my hope is that we see more inclusivity and equality in the roles all genders play within our organizations. Looking forward, AbelsonTaylor Group’s culture and employee programs, such as our Psychological Safety initiative, help bring gender parity to the healthcare advertising agency world and build and encourage workplace diversity. This is important because when more diverse perspectives and inputs are contributed to the creative work and campaigns, the more effective and productive we can be in driving results for our clients. And that allows us to thrive as an agency and personally feel empowered.

What female execs do you find especially notable and inspiring?

Karen Lynch, CEO of CVS Health, recently shared her story and rise to leadership in her new book Taking Up Space, a great example of why it is so important to continue to share our stories so future generations are aware of the past, stand up for their future, and ensure we continue to progress forward being heard.

The art and science of healthcare brand communications has matured at a furious pace all around us these past few years. Brand managers and their agency partners must keep abreast of the latest tools used to measure their audiences and target those audiences with exactly the right message, at the right time and in the right place. But sometimes the maturation of marketing technologies outpaces the speed at which we think about what we can do with those technologies.

Such has been the case with the challenge of identifying and properly crediting the value of a brand’s various touchpoints with audiences. Even in the present age of AI, big data and omnichannel marketing, pharma brands—for the most part—are stuck to the traditional idea that the last touch, the last communication someone receives before converting, should get all, or most of the credit for that conversion. Or, they might not even know which touchpoints to attribute credit.

At AbelsonTaylor Group, we work with our clients to look beyond that conventional worship of the last touch and provide evidence-based methods to calculate the real impact of every touchpoint more accurately. We continuously develop platforms and processes in which clients can have a high degree of confidence. They can see which tools, communications and platforms are responsible, and to what degree for nudging doctors or patients a little, or a lot of the way, towards the brand. Based on these learnings, experienced pharma brand managers have transformed their decision-making process to see measurable returns.

This is called multi-touch attribution, a technique that assigns a fractional credit for each conversion to each touchpoint, which then undergoes careful data analysis of the relationships. That’s an oversimplification of everything going on under the hood, of course; sourcing the right data from each touchpoint, linking all the unique customers together across channels and building a platform and model that can handle review and analysis of multiple data sets are all challenging undertakings.

We at AbelsonTaylor Group have implemented multi-touch attribution tracking with HCPs and their many sign-up or sign-in activities, offering brands increased insight into the degree to which each channel is influencing HCP decisions. Meanwhile, we continually gain more advanced tools and technologies that allow us to see even deeper into the data.

What can multi-touch attribution uncover? Well, if a brand manager knows how much a brand is spending per touch via a particular channel and knows how many touches add up to an entire conversion, then that brand manager can calculate relative cost per conversion for each channel. And that brand manager might just discover surprising insights along the way. One of our clients, for example, was astonished to find that the cost per attributed conversion for one HCP social media channel was more than seven times the cost for another, similar channel.

Through multi-touch attribution, determining how much fractional credit each touchpoint earns per touch takes us a long step towards answering that old marketing saw, “I know I’m wasting half my promotional budget, but which half is it?” And answering that brings us a big step closer to every brand’s goal of the right message at the right time in the right place.