Building a better biotech brand for human kind

As one of the most prominent biotech manufacturers in the world, BD saw an opportunity to reinvigorate its 125 year old brand after acquiring a major competitor. While the newly combined organization had outlined an initial strategy, it lacked a tangible way to apply this new vision to its vast landscape of products, channels, and brand properties. 

With over 100,000 products in its constantly growing portfolio, BD faced a staggering effort to reinvent its brand for its diverse audience groups around the world. BD’s previous global website and digital marketing properties were difficult to navigate, leaving customers frustrated when searching for something specific.

Further, the old brand system was cold and clinical, making for a joyless experience that left much of BD’s ground breaking innovation undiscovered and under represented. How could we reinvigorate the brand by highlighting BD’s life-saving innovations while creating an intuitive experience for its diverse users across 50+ digital properties?

Organizing the brand

Decades of organic growth and acquisition left BD with a severely disorganized brand landscape.

I helped BD develop a more intuitive product brand architecture by cataloging their wide array of offerings in a more accessible hierarchy for customers. This would later be implemented across BD's digital ecosystem, making navigation and transaction much easier for all.

Capturing BD's diverse audience landscape

A new content strategy: shifting focus from product to patient

While there was much debate about which brand groups deserved the most visibility, there was one irrefutable truth: everyone  was extremely passionate about patient outcomes. 

I used this aspirational truth to tell connected stories across the patient care continuum, giving products a thoughtful home and connecting complex topics in a meaningful way.

Humanizing a clinical space through design

The new focus on patient outcomes allowed BD’s most impactful stories to come the forefront. The new design and content strategy highlighted real people and broke down complex clinical topics into accessible human language. 

Initial testing validated that even clinical professionals preferred warm, relatable content, pushing BD into new territory for an otherwise sterile industry.

Using human context and machine learning to power the experience

With over 30 user groups and 125,000 products, getting users to the right content quickly would require an intelligent system that responded to user need. Instead of relying on static navigation paradigms, we put conversational search at the forefront of the experience.

Using a machine learning (ML) powered search model, we were able to intuit what customers were asking for in a way that became more accurate over time as the model learned users’ natural search language.

Extending the new brand far and wide

The new brand could only be successful if it was consistently usable across a wide range of applications. With my team and client, we re-designed dozens of brand properties, from back-office utilities to immersive consumer facing experiences. 

Measuring up: the value of new experience design

The new approach to customer support at Vivint is estimated to save thousands of hours a month and millions of dollars annually. Perhaps more importantly, the new experience is slated to improve the satisfaction of customers and make the stressful lives of those who work in the call center significantly easier. Combined with a powerful new technical architecture and the retirement of 10+ legacy systems, the new product vision will scale with Vivint for years to come.