As a medical device marketing agency, one of the things that we help our clients do is to figure out their positioning within the market place. We have lots of posts on how we can help our clients differentiate their brands, here and here, BUT in a sense, what we’re trying to do is to help our med device clients protect and grow their businesses. And so you may be asking yourself, how pray tell, does a superbug fit into that?!?
Well I read this article on NPR on the Ancestry of Antibiotic Resistance. One of our clients plays in this space and so that’s probably why the article caught my eye. The gist of the article covers a report that was originally published in Cell. My synopsis is below:
- Bacteria resides in our guts (No kidding)
- When prehistoric creatures lived in the ocean that bacteria was excreted and settled to the ocean floor (No big deal. That was a nice environment for the bacteria and they thrived)
- However, when animals left the sea and started living on dry land, that excreted bacteria was subject to all kind of harsh elements (Sun, heat, dusty barren earth, etc…)
- In order for the bacteria to survive they had to adapt (just like the rest of us)
- The bacteria that adapted the best and poses the biggest challenges for hospitals today is the Enterococci
- According to one of the report’s authors, Michael Gilmore, “Basically, it’s like the bacteria put on a hazmat suit,” and developed characteristics and traits that “help make the bacteria rugged and able to withstand drying out and exposure to disinfectants”
So how does this apply to marketing? Well in a sense, when it comes to building your brand, you want to make sure that you’re building it such a way as to protect it from the competitive elements. And for marketers of med tech, that means doing the voice of customer research to assess the customer’s pain points, developing the product with features that truly differentiate it, gathering the clinical evidence and the conducting the bench top tests that help to prove your points and validate your claims.
And if you can do all of that, you will have built a little hazmat suit for your brand!
