Creating a meaningful tagline that distinguishes your life science brand from others in the category begins with brand positioning.

Why You Need a Powerful Tagline

It’s surprising how many life science companies do not have a distinguishing tagline, because creating an intelligent tagline is key to branding success. Taglines can inspire customers and potential customers while communicating the unique value your organization offers.

There is no element of branding quite as powerful as a strong tagline. After your business name and logo, it is also one of the most important marketing assets of your business. A great tagline expresses your brand’s personality, encapsulates the ideals and values that drive your business, and captivates your target audience, inspiring them to take action.

The reason taglines can do so much heavy lifting with so few words is because they tap into human emotions. If your current tagline does not inspire a feeling about your organization, you might consider rethinking it.

A great tagline should include a differentiating benefit of your brand, evoke positive feelings about your brand and be memorable. It’s a tall order, but remember, your tagline will appear on every email, business card, brochure, web site, and letterhead your company creates. It has to mean something.

The Challenge

Life science companies face unique challenges when creating taglines, such as having to get buy-in at many levels of the organization and needing to find new ways to express a mission many such companies share—improving global health.

A quick look at some life science and biopharma taglines that illustrate this:

Gilead Advancing therapeutics. Improving lives.

GE Healthcare Life Sciences Driving Imaginative Science for a Healthier World

Abbott Laboratories  A Promise for Life

Novartis AG  Caring and Curing

There is nothing wrong with having the same mission as other life science companies, but you must find a unique way to differentiate your brand in order to create a meaningful tagline. A positioning statement can help you do that.

What is a Positioning Statement?

An organization’s belief system includes its purpose, mission, vision and values. It also includes human characteristics such as openness, empathy or altruism. A positioning statement is an internal-facing statement that brings all of these elements together to define who you are as a company and what you want to be to your customers.

In general, a positioning statement includes what your organization does (purpose), whom it does it for (target), why it does it (mission) and how it does it differently than its competitors (vision and values).

A template for creating a positioning statement might look like this:

(Your life science) provides (your target market) with (your product or service) that is (what makes you different from competitors) because we believe (your mission/why you do what you do).

How Your Positioning Statement Can Inform Your Tagline

Once you are clear about your life science brand positioning, it will be easier to craft an intelligent tagline to express it. When distilling your positioning statement into a tagline, it’s important to stay focused on what makes you different and how that difference improves customers’ lives.

Is your organization innovating in new areas of research? Do you focus on personal relationships? Are your products or services empowering other important research? Knowing your strengths will help you more clearly define how your brand stands out and help you create a tagline that packs a punch.

If you are struggling to complete your positioning statement or tagline or you would like an objective review of your current tagline, contact me to schedule a short Pick My Brain session.

You might also consider doing a Communications Audit to assess how your life science brand is evolving and how you can manage it with consistency.