A Case Study in Truthful Messaging
By: Guy Gordon
Tags: Medical Devices, Research, Insights, Messaging, Brand Strategy

1. Background

Sivan Innovation is a medical technology company that develops early detection algorithms for chronic diseases. Their first product, Moovcare, alerts oncologists when a recovering lung cancer patient is about to relapse (i.e. that the cancer has returned).

Lung cancer patients in remission use Moovcare to report symptoms via a weekly questionnaire

Moovcare showed huge promise from the start. Clinical trials proved that patients who used Moovcare survived up to 7.6 months longer than average — and at a fraction of the cost and none of the discomfort of drug-based treatments.

But doctors weren’t interested. Sivan pitch to oncologists and senior hospital officials fell on indifferent ears.

2. The Brief

Reposition Sivan and its Moovcare device in a way that would interest and engage doctors and senior hospital administrators around the world. And do so while preserving the clinical integrity of the product.

3. The Problem

A quick review of Sivan’s marketing explained the doctors’ lack of interest. Doctors are clinical practitioners interested primarily in patient outcomes, yet the company’s literature focused heavily on advanced technology.

No overworked oncologist with 1,500 patients wants to read a 35-page marketing brochure

4. Research

After familiarizing ourselves with the company, the technology, the product and stacks of clinical reports, we reached out to oncologists who would one day use the Moovcare platform.

Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash

We conducted in-depth phone interviews with three top oncologists in the US and France, and visited another three at the hospitals they worked at in Israel. We walked the wards with them. Observed their interactions with nurses and staff. Asked them about their job, their hopes, their frustrations. We witnessed first hand what they dealt with every day as front-line clinicians.

5. Key Insight

Over the course of many hours of conversation, we garnered a ton of valuable information, but the key insight revealed itself when we asked the doctors what their greatest fear was:

Having to tell a patient ‘If only I had known sooner’

Discovering a relapse too late to treat effectively was doctors’ №1 pain. Despite their many years of training and experience and know-how they felt they came up short for patients when medical complications were brought to their attention too late; when the patient’s health had deteriorated to the point that the optimum treatment was no longer an option. This was the source of their greatest professional and personal frustration — and we needed to address it head-on.

This led us to a simple and universally true insight:

The earlier you can detect a problem, the better you can treat it.

6. Truth-Based Strategy

Armed with this insight, we needed to understand what it was about Moovcare that was different and better versus the standard lung-cancer follow-up.

When we got back to the studio, we sketched it out.

Standard follow-up: bi-annual CT scan where anomalies can go undetected for months

The standard follow-up sees the patient return to the hospital on average once every six months for a CT scan. Hopefully the scan shows no relapse and the patient gets the green light. The problem occurs when the cancer returns days or weeks after the scan, and is not picked up until the next scheduled scan many months later.

Moovcare enhanced follow-up: weekly patient reports alert doctors to anomalies immediately

Moovcare solves this clinical blind spot by enabling patients to report their symptoms on a weekly basis through a simple-to-use web-based questionnaire. Sivan’s algorithm analyzes the answers, and if it detects an anomaly, alerts the doctor immediately.

In short, Moovcare allows doctors to detect the early telltale signs of a lung cancer relapse and intervene quickly with the best treatment — and outcome — for the patient.

We distilled this idea into seven words — our strategy statement:

It’s never too early to detect relapse

The real world test of an insight, as Ariel says, is to preface it with the words ‘Isn’t it true that…’ and see if it holds water. In this case it did: there’s not an oncologist on earth who would disagree with the premise of early detection.

We knew we were onto the big idea. Now we had to bring it to life.

7. Strategy Driven Creative

Every good brand identity is informed by a great brand strategy.

The creative concept for Moovcare was already contained within the strategy:

Celebrate ‘early’

Though many other healthtech companies were talking about early detection, no-one had embraced the universal notion of ‘early’ and made it the focal point of their brand communications. It was a differentiating strategy with exciting creative possibilities.

The first thing we did was further distill our succinct one-liner into a pithy tagline:

Early is on time

Does it pass the truth test? ‘Isn’t it true that early is on time’ is a statement 100% of our target audience — oncologists — would agree with, so yes.

Secondly, from a marketing perspective, positioning a company whose core business is developing disease-specific detection algorithms as the ‘early company’ future-proofs its messages for years to come. Whatever the company’s product lineup will look like in 2, 5, 10 years from now, the evergreen promise of early detection will always hold true.

If you’re going to stand for something, stand for something big — bigger than your company and your product — that will remain interesting and relevant to your audience years into the future..