 All right. Thank you all and then welcome before I go too much further. I do want to introduce to you John Hermey. John is the president of Device Farm and John and I are both going to be sharing the platform today as we talk about creating relevant brands. My name again is Clay Wildman. I'm the CEO and the my functional role is Chief Strategy Officer at Device Farm and that's the last you're going to hear about John and me until the end when you'll have an opportunity to decide on your for yourselves if you want to hear anymore about John and me at the end. I do want to start by congratulating two of you who managed to get the Device Farm color palette today. The gentleman in the back with the red and black. Much appreciated in the lady here so thank you. Thank you both very much. There'll be some extra creme brulee for you. All right. So anyway today we're going to talk about creating relevant brands. Now a warning. We have processes. We have structured processes running at our ears to greet brands so that we ensure that we leave no stone unturned. We have a standardized approach that we use each time. That's a warning. The good news is we're not going to bore you with all that stuff as we go through here today. We do have great processes. We've got a great track record for creating relevant brands. However at this point in the day you don't care about all that yet. You don't care that we have any of that yet. So you also don't care that our CV's look nice and our mothers are proud of where we went to school and all that kind of great stuff that people tend to want to hit you with at the beginning. What we want to do really is save all that to the end of our discussion today. We'll tell you a little bit more about us but only really once it's relevant. Once it's relevant to you and you have some context for learning more about Device Farm as a company about John and me in particular as individuals. So today let's talk about why you should care. Or another way of looking at it is this presentation that we're giving right now is going to be relevant to you today at this moment. There's an old marketing axiom many of us are familiar with. It focuses on repetition. Repetition is the key to memorability. A lot of us, a lot of you like me, grew up in marketing and big consumer organizations, PepsiCo and Frito-Lay in my case. Let's hammer 18 gazillion impressions and bludgeon them to death until they all crave Doritos for example. Old way of thinking. Really the key today with all of the multimedia channels that consumers live in today including those who are highly technical like surgeons and scientists and others of that nature. Really the key to being memorable today is relevance. It's not repetition, it's relevance. Now for many of you in the room who are involved in early stage medical device companies, technology companies, this is good news. For marketers with small budgets this is great news. The key to being memorable is relevance. Now when we talk about marketers with small budgets that would be, if you talk to any marketers, how many? All marketers. I've yet to meet a marketer who had all of the budget that they wanted. So this is good news really for all of us. Let's put some context around this. Again getting into the point of why is this discussion even relevant? What's the value of brand relevance? What is the value to us as marketers or as us as people who are running companies or creating brands? What's the value of having a relevant brand? What's it worth? Key statistic. Again coming from brand finance, magazine 62% of the global business value that exists in the world today is intangible. It's not bricks and mortars, not factories, it's intangible assets of which brands are a huge part of that component. 62% of the global business value is intangible. These are intangible assets, they're brands, it's customer goodwill, it's trademarks, etc. And so if these intangible assets are worth so much then we better put some goodness around making them relevant. So brands, relevant brands have real value. When we look at the value, if you will, of being relevant as a brand, it becomes especially important for companies that are emerging companies or companies with emerging or new technologies, which applies to many of us here in the room. Let's look at it this way. There are two real factors here that we want to affect brands. One is brand strength. Brand strength is really a leading indicator of growth potential and future value of the brand. It's a world that a lot of us live in, is developing brands that are going to be really viable at some point down the road. There's also brand stature, more of a lagging indicator, that really talks about the current operating value of the brand. If we look focus over here on brand strength, what are the primary components of brand strength of having a strong brand? Well, first of all, it's differentiation. And in particular, it's energized differentiation. We'll talk about that a little bit more on the next slide. It's also, however, relevance. If we look at these two factors and we think about how do I get to a high D or high differentiation, okay? I'm different from the crowd. iPhones. When iPhones first came out, very different. High level of differentiation. A lot of strength. And the buzz around iPhones were certainly a leading indicator of where that brand was going to go, okay? It still has a lot of differentiation, but it also is moving over here to having a lot of current value as well. If we look in the music world today and just the last year, okay? Lady Gaga, right? Frankly, I spent a lot of time trying to figure that one out over the last year. I first heard really ladies and not a lady. I sort of threw all that. Once I got that locked in, she's different. She's got talent, but she's also got a stick. She's different from the rest of the entertainers. Therefore, high future growth value there with Lady Gaga. I think we figured out she has sold somewhere in the neighborhood of 8 million individual song downloads in the last year. So, a lot of buzz and she seems to be everywhere at this point. She's done a great job of creating high D. We're talking today more about high relevance. Now, relevance can also be attributed to a future brand, a buzz brand if you will, like an iPhone, but also relevance can be something you can maintain over time. You look at these brands. You look at Apple and Disney, Google, Starbucks, Nike. Those brands have remained relevant over time. I think that when we look at ultimately where we're emphasizing long term value, we really need to look at relevance with our brands. Let's take a look at one variable there. We talked about differentiation around brands and not just differentiation to be different, but high energy differentiation. The kind of differentiation that drives brand loyalty. Ultimately, we all want brands that people are intensely loyal to. If you look at the airline industry, very commoditized industry, I think we'd all agree. But if you look in that industry and you look at differentiation and relevance as the driving factors of loyalty, Virgin America, Southwest, JetBlue are clearly differentiated versus their competitors in terms of brand loyalty. They've delivered a very different brand experience to the customer from American Delta United Continental and British Airways, for example. Even in a highly commoditized market, you can drive loyalty through energized differentiation, a combination of differentiation and relevance. A lot of that is really going to be driven by creating an experience. You also see in another commodity market, some of my favorite guys, the eTrade babies. Trading stocks is an extremely commoditized market these days. But I find myself going to eTrade just so I can see what the babies are up to next. So they become relevant. It's interesting. It's entertaining that once I'm there, in those cases, I know my personal behavior is I usually look at some other aspect of their product offering when I'm there. So ultimately as marketers, we want to create to be relevant high energy brands, not just different, but differentiation that has some energy, specific energy associated with it. Now, a lot of us as marketers sort of grew up on another old axiom of first to market. First to market wins. First to market is always the big winner. First to market is obviously an advantage, but not always the key indicator of success. Case in point, we'll go back to 1912 on this one. And my old friend Otto Frederick, I always want to call him Rockwiler, but he's actually a roweater. I believe it's the right term. He's the guy that figured out how to slice bread, okay? First to market, figured out how to slice bread, thought he was going to make a gazillion dollars, you know, had venture capitalists and, you know, he was on CNBC the whole deal back in 1912. So he figured out how to slice bread. The problem is nobody cared. Nobody cared at all about the fact that I could get my bread sliced in 1912. Twenty years later, however, Wonder Bread Company comes out with sliced bread packaged nicely in the original artwork here, but they made the sliced bread relevant, okay? People enjoyed the convenience of the sliced bread, but the convenience enough wasn't what the convenience itself was not enough to get them to pay a premium for sliced bread. What was, was this line, build strong bodies 12 ways. Building strong bodies 12 ways, giving my children something healthy and it being convenient as well. That made the Wonder Bread brand very relevant at that point. So convenience, innovation, just for innovation's sake, weren't enough, they needed relevance. And the relevance came with a promise to make my kids healthier by eating a big giant loaf of soft white bread, okay? Later on we'll talk about things being true, which are often very helpful. Now as we talk about the, as we talk about our brands again, about relevant brands, another, another key issue is in today's market especially, very different from 1912, contextual relevance, okay? Contextual relevance. If we're welcome to talk to our target audience, we're not an intrusion. If we're welcome, we're not an intrusion. I use case in point. And to quote here, at any given market in any, in any given moment, in any given market, some people are all ears. They're ready to hear from us. There's somebody on the earth today that really cares what I have to say right now. Okay? Hopefully one of them is in the room? Perhaps not. Perhaps they'll be on the UCI extension program on the website. But hopefully somebody is welcoming us to, to give this message. And ultimately someone hopefully is welcoming all of you to deliver your relevant message to them. The internet obviously has made this much easier in, in many ways. People want to hear from you, okay? The question is, who wants to hear from you? Why is it they want to hear from you? When and how? Classic case here. A company that's done this very well. Real Age. Okay? Real Age is, is one of the offshoots of the old Dr. Oz phenomenon. Real Age has about 10 million members who go online and actively manage their personal health. Okay? As part of managing their personal health, they deliver tremendous amounts of information into Real Age. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 specific data points, they get to be very personal. Okay? When you go through Real Age, they want to know a lot of stuff that I'm not telling a lot of other people. Okay? Some of it's sort of embarrassing if you had to, if you had to see it in public. But all of a sudden I feel very comfortable telling these people, you know, lots of things I wouldn't tell my next door neighbor. Once, once that happens then, you're basically giving them permission to send you an ad. It's like Mrs. Smith saying, Real Age, thank you so much would you please send me nine ads over the course of the next nine weeks. It's, it's contextually relevant. If I go in there and determine that I want to lose weight, for example, and I want some secret tips on how to lose weight other than diet and exercise. Cribs are laid by the way that we serve you today. It's going to be very helpful for those of you that have an interest in weight loss. RealAge.com actually, after you leave here, we'll help you out with that. The point is, you go in and you're asking, Mrs. Smith goes into Real Age and she is asking for marketers who have information that is relevant to her to deliver that information. That gets us into relevance. And relevance in a lot of cases becomes contextual today. We're not relevant to everybody. We're ultimately trying to drill down to determine contextually to whom we're relevant and to whom we're not. Two more thoughts real quickly before John comes and gives you some real life examples of this. And we want to talk for a moment just about the relevance of being remarkable. The relevance of being remarkable. How many of you have read Seth Gooden's book, The Purple Cow? Anybody here read that? If you haven't read it, I'm going to help Seth make some money. Go get it. It's an easy read. I won't tell you which room of the house I read mine in, but I read the entire book in one very particular room in the house. So it's an easy read, so to speak. Anyway, the point that Seth made in his book, the premise of the book, The Purple Cow, was that he and his family were driving through France and they were driving through the French countryside and it was beautiful and there were rolling hills and there were cows. And the family was enamored with the cows. And all the beautiful cows, the green grass, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Twenty minutes later, one of the kids goes, Dad, there's nothing but cows here. Twenty minutes earlier, it's beautiful. They're great cows, et cetera. The cows have become irrelevant. There's so many of them and they all look the same and it was just cow after cow after cow. And remember, we said earlier, repetition's not the key to being relevant. So after a while, this beautiful French cow had become irrelevant to the family. So the question we all have is, how do we make our brands remarkable? We have to be remarkable to remain relevant. We think of Disney World. Very relevant today. Why? Because it is remarkable. We're emotionally creating very remarkable experiences and as marketers, we have to build remarkable elements into our brand in order to stay relevant over time. Final thought on this for all of us, this should be a scary thought. The opposite of remarkable is very good. I can be very, very good and not remarkable. There are somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 people that play basketball in the NBA in the National Basketball Association. At the end of the day, about eight jerseys said a lot, okay? Because the players are remarkable. Kobe Bryant is remarkable. The other guys are very good. They're better than 99.9999% of all the other people on the planet that play basketball. But they're not remarkable in the context of their market, which is the NBA. So the opposite of remarkable is very good. With that said, I want to turn it over to John Hermion. As we talk about brand relevance now, John's going to focus a bit more on really picking the right customers or ultimately to sum that up, the ones that we want and ultimately the ones that we want when we want them. John? Really, our clay talks about resources and the fact that we don't have as many resources as we would like, that's both budgets but it's human resources too. You only have so many sales reps, you only have so many executives, and when you're starting going out and marketing, frankly, the executives will often do a lot of the selling. So how do we most effectively and efficiently have success? That's what a lot of this is about. So here's the first example or a framework for people to think about as they approach the market. Relevance and who? Go for your innovators and early adopters and they'll tell the majority when to buy. This works very well in healthcare marketing. Think about who your innovators are, your early adopters. In some of the examples here and in some of the next cases I'm going to show you, we literally sit down with the clients and talk about this. We go into what organizations are they with or we actually get down to names and we start talking about who these people are going to be. Once the innovators start to move, once the early adopters start to move, once these people find out it's okay, what you're really doing is taking these people's interest to generate early sales, early success and have them spread the word. Simply, this is a product we're working with, PlexiD, it's an avid product. It's a PCRESI mass spec system and what it does is it allows you to test the sample and give results and where before you would have to ask somebody, you'd have to basically say, is this X, is this Y, is this Z? It essentially tells you, it's not getting too complex about it. Our campaign asks differently, asks faster, this product is just launching and the key, again, is getting the innovators and early adopters, even a place like avid has to consider this given their resources. So, pick the right customers. Who's most important, most profitable, most likely to sneeze? When you sneeze, you're basically spreading germs across so you're spreading, you're contagious and it's essentially a strong word of analogy, that's another one of the purple cow, Seth Godin's expressions. Ignore the rest for now. That's hard to do, that's discipline. You don't have to go off and say I'm going to go after my entire target market at once. Pick the people you think that will help you sell the most. You're trying to turn them into your advocates, basically. Cater to the customers you choose as you can choose your customers. Another case study, this is going to get into the company iScience. Startup, I think it's been a few years now, I don't know if they'd call themselves that. Now, they're getting a little more mature but their startup, it's an ophthalmology company, they make a catheter that goes into the eye, first catheter in the eye, so it's a big deal. And it's essentially the first therapeutic area they go after is glaucoma. So, for us, our innovators are the glaucoma KOLS and society leaders. So, we're really adopters or cataract glaucoma surgeons and we move forward to the high volume cataract surgeons. Good example, though, of when we started we literally sat down at the side and who some of these people are. Now, invariably, they're going to do some of the people that do some of your trials. And that's, I think, a known quantity. But even then, you want to ask yourself which one of these people do I really want to be my scope to people? Is this a good scientist that I don't want to have to be my advocate? Are there people that weren't this just comes back to a limited resource this conversation? You really need to sit down and think about who do I want being my person spreading my word. What we did with Eye of Science was we went through a step-by-step process with them. Number one, define the brand. So, that's typical things you hear, positioning, messaging, logical reasons to use, things like that. That all system define the brand. When you're done doing that, what we call a brand map, when you're done with your brand map, it's important that you ask yourself questions. Does my brand have clarity, relevance, energy, leverage, differentiation? And we literally walk through and ask ourselves those questions and take a test and say, is this going to pass muster or not? So start with your brand, define it and then put yourself through this test and say, am I ready to go to market? Second step, develop brand guidelines. Just an extension of that. What are my brand roles? This company actually has multiple products and they can be used in the back of the eye too. So you have to say to yourself, plan now for the future. You should probably know how your brand is going to evolve or at least how you think it's going to evolve in the next few years. So, how does the eye ultrasound play versus the eye track? Well in our case the eye track is more important. But we had to have that discussion. What's really the lead product here for the eye sound? Keep rolling. So, basically get your guidelines. Step three, communication infrastructure and communication architecture. We've gone ahead and we've put up the different types of audiences that I think most of you have to also deal with. You're KOL, you're innovators, you're investors, even the media. Think about what each person hears if you need to write a separate communications platform for each one to do that. The message can be tailored and shifted slightly for each. Four, brand launch. So now that you've got your message, you've got your brand, you're ready to launch. Go ahead and do your brand launch next. You can see different pieces there, internally. You really should sit down. In the case of eye science, there was an internal meeting where everybody went through the brand map. Why? Because they're all out there in the field. They go out, they talk to customers. Basically, this is about anybody can, executives can. R&D guys are out in the field all the time. I think a lot of the R&D guys have more impact on these people than the sales people, truthfully. So, sit down and say, I'm going to go through my entire company with my brand map, and everybody is singing out the same song, but KOL is the glaucoma innovators. In this specific instance, some of the company executives went with KOL specifically to go through this. Because they wanted to make sure that these KOLs knew how to speak about the company. It was not important to sit down and say, here's how we want to talk about ourselves. Stepping back, truthfully, some of these people were involved all the way back in the next one, two, and three. But, get these people ready to talk the way you want to talk. PR, we started with PR. Again, that's our resource thing. And the trade publications really liked the fresh news. We held a news conference at one of the major trade shows. I say media on this slide, but really, we didn't go do trade advertising right away. We didn't start trade advertising for almost two years. Because, again, we were focusing on word of mouth and getting it going. And only when the word of mouth was growing enough did we then go out and do an ad campaign. Highly relevant brand connections. But clearly, called equalization. So, what you see down here on the left are a couple of examples of peer-to-peer. In this specific case, and I think this is true a lot, highly relevant brand connections. But clearly, called equalization. So, what you see down here on the left are a couple of examples of peer-to-peer. In this specific case, and I think this is true a lot, peer-to-peer for what we do is very, very important. We filmed presentations. These are two of our thought leaders, and we filmed them at a major conference and put it in development via the internet. So, did you hear their thoughts? This is an example. This is actually social media. We called it the iForum. And it is a social media where the doctors that are trained, login, password protected, they go in and they share their pearls of wisdom, their thoughts, their techniques. All techniques evolve. We all think we can go out and tell the doctors, here's how you do my technique. Change. They put little nuances, et cetera. And they love to hear about that. That's what they like to talk about. So this is an opportunity and a password protected environment for them to share and influence each other on what they're doing. And it's a way that nobody else can get in. Doctors don't like to put stuff on the internet. We find, on the left side, they think it's got the appropriate safeguards. So, that's what we've done here. We've created peer-to-peer communication. And last, actually not last, let the customer be the brand. So this is an example of iScience, the iForum. These videos are videos they're posting. Basically, we get them to talk about this stuff. And it turns out that we don't need to do as much. The other way to do this is do your usual conferences, put them up on the podium. You can also have them do your didactic courses. But it's the only idea of taking them and using them is to be part of your brand. The iForum has a message board, video gallery you've seen, and we put procedural education on it also. Last, equip the customer to be an active brand participant. Surgeon training, we've involved some of them in didactic training. MD and D referral. This is within ophthalmology, but practice patterns are very similar in a lot of disciplines. People that do this canaloplasty procedure, you'll have your set of surgeons start. There are people that address ophthalmology specifically that don't even do this surgery. So we made tools so that one ophthalmologist can talk to another and say I can do this if you're at a last resort. We made tools so that they can send it to a general ophthalmologist or a cataract surgeon. And there is actually a variation of these that are made for the ODs. So really think about your channels and how do you let doctors reach out to other doctors and make their referral get their referral network stronger. That's a big piece of it. All we've done is basically given tools to make it simple so that they can turn around and if they want to head into their office admins and have them send out all these letters on their behalf and all these materials. It's a good way to introduce a topic. Finally patient education, let them educate their patients. I'm going to turn it back over to Clay. Very good. Thanks John. So what John just showed us again is a great example of really the targeting that has to occur to be relevant. In other words we have to narrow down especially with startup brands. There's usually a very small segment of the market to whom any startup brand is relevant. What we have to do is turn those people into the term John just used with sneezers. Turn them into sneezers and point them in the right direction. A little bit of a gross analogy here because he's on the right people in this case. So eye science is a great example of where that occurred. Now let's move on here before we talk about the processes for doing this just a little more context. We're trying to create relevant brands but that's partly done through creating relevant brand experiences. So many more of the brands that we interact with in today's culture are brands in which we're immersed or in which we are active participants. We want to try to look for opportunities to create active participation or even immersion in the brands that we're marketing. When we talk about experiences we talk about looking at experience realms and we talk about immersion. So I'm going and immersing in either an aesthetic or an escapist type activity or I'm an active participant perhaps in an educational program or educational environment. We're really trying to avoid as much as possible sort of absorptive or passive experiences. Now by default we'll have to have some of those but where we really create relevance is more in this zone here. We're talking about active participants or participants who are literally immersed in our brand what do we mean by that? We gain value through experience our brands become more valuable. All of us have grown up in the era where we went from paying X number of finis for a cup of coffee to a minimum of a few bucks every morning or most mornings for a cup of coffee. So ultimately creating a relevant experience lets us move into the realm of we are what we charge for. Starbucks is not selling coffee. Literally when people say I'm going to go get a Starbucks and they don't say I'm going to get a cup of coffee in many cases. I'm going to get a Starbucks. A Starbucks can apply many different items on the menu but they're going to get a Starbucks. They're going to have that experience that they're not getting by pulling into the gas station and getting a cup of coffee that way. So when our brand becomes the definition of the experience at that point we have the ability to charge more for that brand to become relevant in day to day life. Now as we talk about experiences too and about gaining more value for our brand there we want to create brands that transcend again simple goods and services. Take for example the Nike spark system Have you ever seen this? It's a training system. I purchased one of these for the happy price of $200 thinking that all of the future Olympians and players in my house would immediately run out in the field and train themselves into a peak condition. Okay? I'll sell it to anybody that wants it for $10 at this point. Anyway, the point is the whole proposition here is that I need to turn $10 worth of plastic and nylon into a $200 value as a brand. How do I do that? I'm embedding my goods and services into an experience. The experience of training in this system is an immersion brand. I am not just looking at the brand or seeing the brand. I am the brand. I become the epitome of what's being shown to me on the website or on the commercials. I become this chiseled NFL linebacker. When I'm out running through those little ropes in the park I become this guy. A few more pounds I become that guy. I'm immersed in the brand. And as a result, I'll pay more for it. Okay? In fact, I'll pay $200 for 10 bucks worth of plastic and nylon. So let's take a look at now taking that concept of creating an experience a brand experience into real life. And I'm going to use an example here around what we call the hard hope brand. Our client here is a client in a leader in the cardiovascular world. They make ventricular assist devices for people who are very, very sick with advanced stage heart failure. The alternative to which is a transplant or a death, unfortunately. In many cases these are very sick patients. At the time that we began working with Thorotek and we looked at this map the situation was that they were the leaders in technology. Technology had been approved by the FDA but the technology certainly had not advanced to its final form. Also, as you go through an FDA clinical trial you learn a lot about the application of the technology. Okay? And how that can be better used. So we had a technology wasn't the ultimate technology yet but it was good but it was going to help move the discipline of ventricular assist devices or move that field along. So that centers, so that surgeons can treat these sick patients. But you had a lot of other companies coming into the marketplace as well and so for Thorotek in this case they realized that what we needed to do was to create a shared experience where the company as a responsible participant and highly committed, we're talking about context here, highly committed customers could participate particularly in the experience of ushering this technology along and helping more people. Ultimately creating a market but also creating a therapy category that was viable. Okay? So with that being the context which we learned by the way through a lot of market research with the customers. Okay? On the front end the customers told us they wanted the company to do well. They wanted the company to be the responsible steward and they wanted to see the market do well. So but what we did based on that is we focused on becoming relevant to 30 surgeons in the United States. 30 innovators at major heart centers in the country and what we understood from them is they wanted a platform or relationship to help train the referring physicians and to reach out and educate patients and families because patients and families were much more interested in a therapy that was an alternative to dying then we're say people reading a scientific journal and not really putting a face to it. As a result we created a brand for this relationship that was going to last over a period of time called Heart Hope. So with the Heart Hope brand what we did is over the last seven years now that brand began by helping those 30 centers. Again we narrowed the focus. We wanted to be relevant to 30 centers helping them communicate with the market with patients and families. Helping them with education of referring physicians and really partnering with them in a shared experience of creating a new therapy category. We also when we look at immersion we incorporated those customers into participating in developing advanced practice guidelines. Guidelines that were going to evolve over time we actively reached out and created what we call the Park City Work Group where some of those 30 physicians joined together and they became immersed in the brand. All of this communication by the way done under the umbrella of this Heart Hope relationship brand. Today that brand has evolved. We need that brand to be more relevant to more people today. Today there are hundreds of centers that now do this procedure nationally that use the technology actually more hundreds globally. The Heart Hope brand has become such a strong brand in terms of the relationship that it really has become the entire brand contextually for educating cardiologists and referring physicians if you will who are caring for these patients in their community. So what began is sort of a program relationship has evolved really into a branded relationship overall that the company has with its customers. Again all the result of entering into a shared experience and immersing the customer into our brand. Our customer became our brand through Heart Hope. So let's go to the final leg here in terms of what are the tools that we're going to use we want to create relevant brands. How are we going to do that? We're going to start contextually with where the brand fits and we'll use a portfolio strategy map part of you some of you have probably used tools like this before this will help us decide where do we fit in the universe? Where do we fit in the universe? Does our brand fit? How does our brand fit within the universe of brands that we have in our company? Okay are we a single product company? Are we a multi product company? Are we multinational etc? How do we fit? What's the context for our brand all of which will feed us down to what John talked about earlier is synergy and leverage and relevance and differentiation and ultimately clarity in the communication of our brand message. So we always will start with context. At that point we'll move in more to the brand map which is really putting expression to the position that we want to occupy in the market okay when we get talk about brand map we're now talking about getting everything into alignment. When internal what we'll call internal and external identities okay what we really are in the market and what we say we want to be internally. When those come into alignment we have a strong brand okay a quick departure into narcissism for 30 seconds. This was a quote that a client of ours gave me unaided a few weeks ago we're having lunch in the bay area and he says you know we can get pretty pictures from a lot of places but what I work with you guys because when I need to get strategic help I get it when I need it. I always know that I can get it. Our number one brand value is accompanying is be strategic in all things. Number one brand value accompaniment. Our client not knowing that that was a particular value expressed in our own brand map just communicated it to us over lunch okay so that worked well. As we talk about the brand mapping process there are really four components that we want to look at. First of all we'll talk about brand values okay and when we talk about brand values we want to talk about those values for our brand that are so integral that basically our brand would die. Our brand would just go away if that value seems to exist okay. Now when we look at that brand value we also recognize if we say it's that important do we adhere to it. Is it brand values are those values that we should adhere to no matter what okay nuclear you know winter is raining down on us and we're going to maintain that brand value no matter what. So we'll go through what we call a tombstone exercise. If we look at that value that brand value that we say is so important would our customer miss it if it went away would our employees miss that value if it went away and and what I miss it frankly if it went away okay so we go through what's called a tombstone exercise there. Once we've established our values then we get into the core message this becomes now we get into the challenging part. As John talked about earlier narrowing down that message. Core message why do we exist. We need to go through a perception reality exercise here. You know ultimately we're trying to get to the big idea in a simple statement in a differentiating manner and guess what it has to be true. Okay we've all seen some examples recently of brands that were projected to be one thing but turned out and maybe not. Maybe weren't quite as true. Simple litmus test here. Litmus test to apply read your core brand message to someone because we talk about simplicity. Okay read it to somebody and then ask them to say it back to you. If they can't repeat it back to you the first time go back. Probably either doesn't make sense or it's a little bit too long. Okay. I gotta be able to get it the first time. Litmus test also from a brand message. Have I made the choice easy? Okay. When the customer sees my message versus another message. Have I made the choice easy? Is it black and white? Do they clearly know what I do and is that differentiated? Again. Is there clarity here? I want black and white. I don't want shades of gray in my core message. Ultimately also my message needs to speak to what's important to the customer. Not just blowing my own horn. Okay. So things like we're the fastest this. We're the biggest this. We're the world's best this. All that's about me. The brand message has got to be about what's relevant to my customer. Great case in point here. AMO Advanced Medical Optics which is now Abbott Medical Optics. Last year. Brand message. Vision for life. Vision for life. Vision for life was developed to communicate to the customer what the company is all about. The core brand message as a company we're about vision for life. We're about providing you with this. So. Relevance. Vision for life. From 9 to 90. The technology. The support. And the lifestyle experience for our customers. Customer. When we talk about vision for life. Vision for life. Vision for life. Vision for life. Vision for life. Vision for life. Customer. Customer. When we try to define the core message what is the company all about. The company done a fabulous job of developing technologies or acquiring technologies that all when put together allowed the ophthalmologist the surgeon to deliver vision for life. A better life experience for their patient by using this combination of technologies and with the support that the company was going to provide to make them successful. Ultimately the company got in alignment with the customer. The customer's focus was our focus. It was a mirror image of delivering vision for life. The method for doing that was what we called being the complete refractive solution. To the customer to help the customer meet their customers needs which is vision for life. So what's the company all about? Vision for life. Delivering. Helping you doctor deliver vision for life for your patients. These patients young to old. They're your focus. They're our focus too. We're in alignment. Now when we move beyond the brand map again when we talk about creating the message our core brand message a lot of times people get hung up on well you know another company might say something similar to that. You're always going to run into that issue but take the case of FedEx. When FedEx got into the overnight shipping business there were other companies that did what FedEx did with their core brand message was deliver a core brand message to the market that was differentiated versus the postal service but more importantly it was the message they could own they could do it and they could deliver that experience and they got down to the essence of what was important to the customer. Absolutely positively has to be there overnight. If you want to roll the dice call UPS, call the postal service call your friend, call whatever if it absolutely has to be there overnight if you need that confidence call us, okay was it the most differentiated? No but it was a brand they could own it was a brand they could live and be true to every day and people could live it. Now when we're talking about our core message again who do we focus on John alluded to earlier. Discipline in our messaging is key. Who do we focus on? We use the term lightning rod audience. If lightning could strike one place in your business world to make you successful one place. If it could strike a person, a group of people, a narrowly defined spot on this earth where would it strike? We call that the lightning rod audience okay these are the people that are the influencers, the experts, the gatekeepers they're the people they're going to tell others. They're the people with whom we have to be relevant initially. A lot of core brand messages get diluted and as a result of dilution irrelevant because they don't focus on that narrow audience. They're trying to be everything to everybody. The key to avoiding that is to identify that narrow as narrow an audience as possible for your relevance and we call that the lightning rod audience. Then you go test it. We call that C what they hear. Through testing either qualitatively or quantitatively. When I say those words to my customer what are they hearing? I know what I may be thinking what are they hearing? You got to make sure that what they're hearing is relevant as well. Messages. A core message. Every time you add a layer of messaging to your core message you're doing two things. One you're adding new competitors and two you're adding a new financial commitment that it's going to take to back that up. All the more reason to keep the number of messages very very focused and again ultimately to a core brand message if possible. After we get to the brand values and the core brand message we get into personality. Every brand has a personality. When we talk about brand personality who are we going to be in all circumstances? Newness is not a personality. Okay well this is new. It's great. It's not new forever. Okay so that is not a personality. It's a short term tactic. Let's look at this. Two different movies. Two different characters. Same actor. Okay Sylvester Stallone has created a brand personality. Whether he's rocky, young rocky or old rocky or Rambo I understand there's an old Rambo coming out Rambo wheelchair board or something to that effect. Ultimately though that brand personality is consistent. The unbeatable spirit, the comeback kid, the guy willing to take a hit to get the job done. That to me was a great example of how the personality needs to really be who you are over time. Okay I don't want Sylvester Stallone to be new. He may have a new movie but I'm looking for the confidence, the assuredness in that brand that comes with a consistent personality. And then finally we look at icons. Okay every brand is going to have value, message, personality and then ultimately you're going to have icons associated with the brand. Your name, your logo those are easy. Okay but you're also going to have colors and shapes and other elements that are going to be iconic to your brand. Okay and even starting at the name and going forward it communicates a lot about the personality and about the relationship. You know if we had IBM and Apple and they were here and they had a company and my name is IBM International Business Machines. I'm thinking okay you're probably well organized and you know it's great. Hi my name's Apple. Okay I'm thinking hey you're sort of fun to be around. Perhaps. If you met IBM over there he needs a personality to make up. So the you see there the whole issue of our personalities expressed through the various icons. And the name is just the beginning of that. Sometimes we'll have clients come to us and say okay we've got to create a brand. What they really mean is I've got to get a name. Okay a name is one of the last things that you want to do in creating a brand. Naming comes pretty far down the road. When we look at brand icons there are certain elements in this world that are very iconic. Michael Jordan is still the number one brand icon associated with basketball shoes today. He hadn't played in a little while. Okay brand icons have to be true to the brand. The good news about Michael Jordan is a brand icon for if you're Nike basketball shoes is he's been there done that and he's not going to break his leg or throw the ball out of bounds in the last second anymore. It's a known it's a known quantity at this point. So brand icons are good using people can be good using people can also have some challenges. If the brand icon turns out not to be true to the brand personality and the brand values that they have been projecting. So not to take a shot at Tiger but it's the most relevant example of that in the market today. So brand icons be careful when we pick our brand icons. Make sure that those are icons with which we have a high level of confidence is being sustainable over time. Finally as an example of this quick example of these shaping brand personalities in the life sciences space a company here MP Biomedical you see a very traditional technology ad I showed the machine I'll tell you some features about the machine. It looks like 15 other ads in the same scientific publication. We went and evaluated the audience. The target audience the lightning rod decision maker in that laboratory is a master's level person maybe a grad student even master's PhD level somebody in their late 20's to 30's smart perhaps a little quirky but definitely not a boring group of people. They've got a unique sense of humor as we're learning and going in there. And whether it was our clients ad or brand or any other competitive brands they're all pretty boring. The brand personalities of the instrument didn't really match with the audience that they were selling to. So we came in and decided that the brand personality needed a make up. And so what we've done now here is gone to playing on some of that quirkiness you see a product ad here dirty samples, tiny samples, tough samples, you've got a rat with a knife for example and these are issues that the scientists are dealing with no problem with fast prep which is an automated lysing and imagination system. So we've taken boring science instrument, lab equipment and really tried to project a personality with some quirkiness and interest but by staying on message as well. Now quirkiness for quirkiness sake is not a strategy but trying to make it more relevant differentiate and create personalities that ultimately the scientist can interact with. Final thought here, persuasion architecture. How do we persuade our customers? How do we get invited in to participate with them? We've got to get our angle of approach right. For example, we've got to understand the customer's need. I've got a fat dog. My dog is fat. How does my customer perceive the fat dog issue? My dog is fat. My dog is overweight. My dog needs new food. It's not the dog's fault. The dog needs a nutritionist. The dog needs to lose weight. Maybe he's like a suction. Whatever it is the dog needs. How does the customer define their fat dog problem? I've got a fat dog. The customer is going to define it a certain way. I've got to understand that so I can make my proposition relevant to the customer. Once I've done that, I understand how they're approaching, then I'm going to go create what's called a persuasion architecture and decide how am I going to interact with the customer at every phase in a way that is going to be relevant to them. So then giving them the experience and the information they need at every step of the process that they're logically going to take. That's going to be situational and it's going to be based upon my client's unique personality characteristics as well. With that said, John's going to take two minutes, tell you a little bit about device form, and then I'll join you back again to wrap up. John? Okay, well very brief intro very brief intro device form, what you've basically seen us speak for a while, but we are as a provider of marketing strategy and integrated solutions, marketing solutions in the medical and healthcare space. The word strategy is very purposeful. You can see we like to attack problems urgently from start to finish and maintain that throughout the life of brands. Our mission, our mission is to help we help medical manufacturers develop and execute marketing strategies to connect and serve their customers to meet their business objectives. So again we have a very strategic focus. I do want to mention, to be honest some of the things you've seen today are brands fully, you've seen a few deliverables up here that we've done some campaigns and some pieces. Once we identify a brand, create a strategy device form is an agency that can take you all the way through to completion tactically. We like to say we have experience to know the resources to do experience to know we're industry specific resource senior management with over 70 years scientific and medical knowledge, we have an MD, director of medical content resources to do, proven record of success, we've launched over 200 devices it's probably closer to 300 at this point truthfully, we haven't updated this site in a long time an award winning creative excellence our creative director for instance has about 25 years in the business many of our other creative staff and our writers have extensive experience to do. So it's what we do, it's all we do experiencing our resources to do. I'm John Herming I'm a Kellogg MBA I've been doing healthcare specifically for about 12 years been a management consultant and been working in the marketing space for about 20 years now and finally Kellogg, here we go. This is the last thing you're going to hear from us so first of all before I say thank you my background graduate of Vanderbilt been involved in healthcare marketing since 1985 served on a few corporate boards and advisory capacity to do some other companies as well and so again, have been very focused both on the provider side early on as well as just today with an exclusive focus really on medical manufacturers, medical device life science biotech companies as we serve them as clients. See just the snapshot of my background as well.