Hey doc, look at me!

The importance of stopping power is critical to the success of your biotech brand.

In today’s healthcare marketplace, healthcare professionals are numb to everyday patient imagery.

In a previous blog, I reported that Getty Images stated 83% of pharmaceutical clients currently use patient imagery in their advertising and communications. With this rampant lack of originality, stopping power is the secret ingredient to bring your biotech brand to the foreground.

Healthcare professionals interact with hundreds of brand messages daily, in medical journals, in newspapers, in the office, on websites, via rep-delivered or mobile phone, and through many more tactics.

Healthcare advertising needs to cut through this massive amount of noise and clutter to reach target physicians, and grab their attention in a meaningful and quick way that has immediate impact.

That is why it is critical for your biotech brand campaign to have stopping power. Depending on the competitive set in your journal (not just your class of drug), you can accomplish stopping power in several different ways―you just need to be practical.

For example, if patient imagery is dominant in your category or books, maybe a metaphorical representation will provide standout creative. If there usually are busy, overcluttered ads filled with text-heavy claims, try to create the cleanest, most simple layout in the book.

The European Institute of Brand Management has studied the topic, and the results are quite interesting.

Achieving stopping power requires that an ad stands out in terms of design. You could say that an ad needs a certain degree of design complexity.

The researchers broke this down into two kinds of complexity: (1) feature complexity and (2) design complexity.

An advertisement with a high level of feature complexity is one with many colors, differences in light intensity and generally heavily made-up edges. In popular terms: ‘an ad that hurts the eyes of the beholder’.

An ad with a calm, white background, on the other hand, has a low level of feature complexity.

The researchers behind this study advise art directors to refrain from designing ads with a high level of feature complexity. An earlier study had concluded that ads with lots of white spaces lead to high brand ratings.

Pieters, Wedel and Batra confirm that, but add some nuance to that conclusion by stating that it is not the white spaces that lead to a positive attitude, but rather the fact that visual clutter is avoided. Ads with a black background will, in their view, have the same effect as ads with plenty of white in them.

Sometimes the medium can allow you to stand out.

According to the folks at IGH Solutions, independent studies have shown that lenticular imagery has five times the “stopping power” and two times the “staying power” of conventional advertising media. This research demonstrated that lenticular magazine advertising grabs and retains the attention of readers longer than traditional advertising.

Customers also spent more time looking at the lenticular ad—and felt more compelled to purchase the product. These findings are very interesting as they reinforce the need to grab the attention of your target physician.

So whether through the concept itself, or the medium, make sure your brand campaign gets noticed. It will be worth the effort.