Uppercase Branding | Healthcare
Creating Extraordinary Names for Healthcare Businesses
About:
Uppercase Branding prides itself on its ability to bring fresh thinking and applied learning from across business segments to any challenge in any space. This approach has fueled our growth in a range of industries but particularly in the healthcare field. Our subject matter expertise in this discipline combined with our continued innovation in other domains lets us efficiently, creatively, quickly and cost effectively develop powerful names for our healthcare, wellness and life science clients.
Our Model:
Our virtual hub & spoke business model scales up and down keeping our costs low. Our fees are usually less than one half of industry averages.
Our Mission:
Create healthcare brand names with strategic impact. Our names start conversations. They are engaging and facilitate the sales process.
Our Method:
There is no madness to our method. We don’t use jargon. We don’t employ any dogs or ponies. Smoke is for fires and mirrors are for reflection.
We meet with you and peel the onion to get information and insights that inform and inspire.
Our teams of naming specialists, writers, poets and playwrights, linguists and lawyers work individually and together to generate 1,000’s of name candidates.
We vet these names strategically, creatively, linguistically, and legally curating them to a list of 25-30 which we then present to you. Each name is explained with rationale and support.
We encourage you to provide immediate gut feedback, but more importantly to spend time with them. Love doesn’t happen at first sight. As needed we can provide your team with an objective and quantitative evaluation methodology.
We are there for you. Uppercase will provide any follow on support to sell in and socialize the name.
Our Media:
Uppercase Branding as been featured in Stat, MD+DI, Inc., CBC, Fortune, Forbes, and multiple podcasts.
Healthcare | Clients
Uppercase Branding has naming expertise in every healthcare sector including:
Medical Device, Dx, Equipment and Supplies
Pharmaceuticals (proprietary, generic, bio, OTC)
Wearables, Digital Health
Services and Facilities
Biotech
Medical Services, Insurance, and Managed Care
OTC and HBA, B2B and B2C
Our Clients are huge, small and every size in between. They include:
Cardinal Health
Clinical Genomics
Clorox
Cordis
Edwards Lifesciences
Gambro
Haisco
HealthBox
iDev
iRhythm
J&J
Myriad
Nokia wearables
P&G
Providence and Swedish
Qualcomm employee health
RB
ResMed
TruMed Systems
Unilever
Case Studies
Client: Providence Health Services
Challenge
Pacific N.W. hospital name and identity after merger of regional hospitals.
Work
Conducted extensive research: qualitative and quantitative consumer, qualitative and quantitative medical professional, reviewed secondary, investigated religious concerns, best practice examples
Extensive creative development and testing
Recommended keeping identities separate - risk outweighed upside and cost savings
Client: TruMed Systems
Challenge
Healthcare startup needed a brand name for vaccine storage and management device.
Work
Developed strategic verbal brand identity roadmap
Generated more than 550 name candidates, recommending AccuVax
During IP screen, discovered that company name was at risk and recommend new name
Client: Edwards Life Sciences
Challenge
Leading heart device manufacturer needed a themeline for heart valve portfolio to provide competitive separation.
Work
Uppercase created “Designed for Life”
Speaks to competitive advantage of design expertise
Works rationally by suggesting a life-time guarantee
Works emotionally by evoking importance of human life
Client: HealthBox
Challenge
Healthcare incubator sought to establish itself as a thought leader in women’s issues in the life sciences’ space.
Work
Uppercase created “Vision51” idea
51% of healthcare workers are female but that is not reflected at the C-level
“Vision51” seeks to raise awareness to put more women in the corner office
Client: iRhythm
Challenge
Innovative cardiac monitoring company requested a short category descriptor that captured their unique selling proposition.
Work
After creating and testing more than 75 options, created C.A.M., Continuous Ambulatory Monitoring
Rare instance where acronym works; it relates to movement
Client: Qualcomm
Challenge
This high tech enterprise wanted to generate enthusiasm and participation in its employee wellness program.
Work
Uppercase created the brand name WellPort
A place for health and wellness as well as tying in with tech aspects
Client: Clinical Genomics
Challenge
Privately held biotech company needed to brand its ground-breaking diagnostic test for colorectal cancer.
Work
Uppercase created the brand name Colvera
Semantically, Colvera suggests colon without being heavy handed
Linguistically, soft sounds are comforting while ’v’ sound evokes life, e.g. vivid, via, viva, vivo, vitro
Healthcare Press and Thought Leadership
https://www.mddionline.com/how-name-your-new-medical-device
https://www.statnews.com/2017/02/08/drug-names-process/
https://medcitynews.com/2018/08/whats-in-a-name/
One of our latest screeds:
WHY DRUG NAMES ARE SO #@%^&*‘n WEIRD
- By Mike Pile
Watching the evening news is to be barraged with bad news. Not so much with the news itself, but with the onslaught of pharmaceutical advertisements that can trigger temporary fits of hypochondria in even the healthiest viewer.
Though the maladies themselves sound horrible enough, they barely compare to the tongue twisting names of the drugs designed to treat them. Atazanavir, Trancopal, Zerbaxa, why are drug names so odd?
Contrary to popular belief, drug brands are not created by over-medicated creative types throwing Scrabble® tiles at each other. In fact, odd drug names are created on purpose because they are practically mandated by the Food and Drug Administration. And this is a good thing.
The FDA has an alphabet soup of divisions, departments, and offices united by the single mission of reducing injuries caused by confusingly similar drug names. And they pursue this goal by ensuring that each drug name is truly unique. According to the Division of Medication Error Prevention and Analysis, 12.5% of all drug related injuries are due to confusion between drug names. A notable example appeared in 2009 between Durezol, an FDA approved eye medication, and Durasal, an unapproved wart medication. Ouch!
In addition to avoiding IP issues like patent infringement, trademark infringement, and the clutter of 30,000 US proprietary drug brands and 150,000 drug names in Europe, let alone worldwide, drug marketers jump through a multitude of hoops to conform to FDA guidelines for drug naming. (http://www.fda.gov/downloads/drugs/guidances/ucm398997.pdf)
To eliminate, or at least minimize the potential for confusion, the FDA submits proposed drug names to an exhaustive battery of tests design to weed out names that are similar to others in spelling, pronunciation, and scripted appearance. From the general; does this name sound like another, to the granular; how does this name look when handwritten by a random sample of healthcare providers using different colored ink on lined and unlined paper of different stock, the FDA considers every iteration of every scenario along the prescribing chain to uncover areas of potential confusion.
Individually, the FDA’s tests are too numerous to detail without a casual reader nodding off, but an overview of the process can provide insight, understanding and appreciation for the intense work that goes into the development and testing of a drug brand name.
The Office of Prescription Drug Promotion (OPDP) will reject names that are promotional in nature. In other words, if a proposed name communicates, suggests, or otherwise encourages certain restricted messages or uses, it will not make the cut. Primarily, but not limited to these, names must avoid suggesting that the drug overstates its efficacy, minimizes risk, encourages broader use, or indicates superiority. To illustrate, an asthma drug could not be named BreathBetter, a drug for restless leg syndrome named Run-Fast would be rejected out of hand, and clearly Evercure would not work for any drug. Of course, this poses quite the conundrum for marketers whose very DNA compels them to communicate the features, attributes and benefits of the products they are promoting.
The Division of Medication Error and Prevention Analysis’s scope in brand name review is more expansive and, arguably, more crucial. DMEPA will reject any drug name that suggests or otherwise indicates anything to do with dosing; including form, routes of administration, quantity, units, frequency, strength, etc. For example, they’d rejected Skinject, as it could be construed to suggest a route of administration. They will also reject names that are too close in spelling to another name, too close in pronunciation to another name, or simply too close in appearance to another name. If a few dermatologists write their ‘a’s in a way that looks like the way some neurologists writes their ‘g’s, there could be a problem.
Drug makers must avoid names with spelling similarity, orthographic similarity, phonological similarity, IP infringement, foreign language faux-pas, and promotional messages, so is it any wonder that we take Xeljanz for moderate to severe RA? Ask your doctor if it is right for you.
For more information, please contact President and Creative Director Mike Pile at Mikep@uppercasebranding.com.