What Moderna Has Learned About Maintaining Brand Relevance

Healthcare and pharmaceutical companies are not well known for strong enterprise branding, as historically, most of the focus was on branding the products. Only recently have pharma companies increased their focus and spend on their enterprise brands. The industry tends to activate around a product, relying on a consistent format for television commercials, celebrity endorsements and, commonly, non-branded content and advertising as well.

This traditional model of branding healthcare products has worked until we saw what happened with Covid-19, when everyone learned the name of our company overnight. We became very relevant to consumers around the world who wanted to get back to their lives. This lesson on relevance can be applied to companies across the health continuum—health affects everyone, as we saw in the pandemic so clearly.

So how can pharmaceutical and healthcare brands stay relentlessly relevant with consumers and other audiences? Brand leaders have a timely opportunity to reimagine and uplift their enterprise brands, and more so than has been done in the past.

Relentless relevance means keeping an enterprise brand front and center over time and beyond any one milestone or event. It’s the opportunity for consumers to think of a brand as accessible, trustworthy and responsible, beyond any one product, and certainly beyond the pandemic. This is especially important for us now, as Moderna has new data coming out about our investigational mRNA medicines, from oncology to RSV to flu, and we expect several product launches in the coming years. In preparation, we need our customers to build familiarity and trust with Moderna and our mRNA technology, beyond Covid-19 and across disease categories.

That’s why we’ve employed a strategy to demonstrate the ongoing relevance of our brand that we believe other marketers can benefit from—and also why you may have seen Moderna show up in surprising places. The following are a few ways we’re keeping our enterprise brand top of mind and branding “outside the box” of traditional healthcare and pharma. 

Consider all diverse audiences and ‘go there’

We really think about all the different audiences that interact with Moderna: the people who have already received our vaccine; the people who know about our brand but don’t know much about mRNA technology; the people who are super interested in mRNA and want to know more. While another brand might have stopped at the sheer magnitude of how many people first learned about Moderna in the pandemic and market broadly, we are dissecting and segmenting every audience familiar with our brand and employing strategies to reach them all. 

Through our research and inquiry, we know that our different audiences are interacting with and absorbing information about our brand in myriad places. We aim to understand each segment’s behavior and find them where they are, not where traditional biopharma would be. A great example is our sponsorship last summer of the U.S. Open, where we held a booth on-site and partnered with Billie Jean King to celebrate her as a changemaker in sports.

We’ve also shown up at the Consumer Electronics Show, where we sponsored a Digital Health Studio which captured in-depth discussions on what changes are happening as a result of new digital innovations in healthcare technology. At CES, we stood out as one of a few enterprise healthcare companies with a strong presence, and we’re continuing to find ways to “go there” and go where all of our diverse audiences choose to be.

Leverage education to build trust and go a layer deeper

Post-pandemic, we’re seeing a trend of consumers wanting to better understand how medicines are made and care is conducted. People are seeking out more information, wanting and willing to know more about technologies like mRNA, which historically might have felt too “high tech” for the average person. You can see this with the way people are talking about and interacting with ChatGPT and generative AI. Rather than assuming people won’t understand our technology, we instead belabor the words and channels we use to get information to them, like how we use short videos and polls about mRNA on Instagram. This is an opportunity to educate everyone and go a layer deeper than our direct buyers—the healthcare professionals.

While consumers aren’t the primary purchasers of our vaccines, their understanding of mRNA and questions around it does impact and inform what healthcare providers and pharmacists think about it, too. We know this from our internal market research—that healthcare professionals and consumers are generally aligned on the key points about mRNA and interest in being educated on it more. Our latest advertising campaign, “Welcome to the mRNAge,” has been well received by providers and consumers alike and is a launching pad for more on this topic.

Establish strategic alliances with those who share your vision and values

It’s important to align with the changemakers advancing more than just medicine—a future that is more diverse, healthy and globally connected.
 
I moderated a panel at SXSW this year where I interviewed changemakers who use their platforms for good and, in doing so leverage their brands to solve social issues at scale. We featured Kathryn Finney, the Genius Guild’s Venture Fund managing general partner, and Jacqueline Jones, LinkedIn’s head of strategic partnerships for diversity, inclusion and belonging. This type of panel was a departure from what you might expect from our industry but reflected fierce women who value access, innovation and an entrepreneurial mindset. It was such a stirring conversation, and I’m looking forward to more Moderna-led initiatives like it.

By putting more emphasis on the enterprise brand, considering all audiences, engaging them in educational content and creating strategic alliances with like-minded brands, there is a sustained opportunity to build reputation, loyalty and trust with customers. This comes at a time when many consumers are doubting health institutions altogether. It would be wise, then, to switch up the model we’ve always used and brand differently. Consumers are growing allergic to the old way of doing things; they want more education and access.

Outside of healthcare, these relentless relevance tactics are applicable to all industries. When we bring consumers along on the journey—not holding back or waiting for a product launch—it not only keeps your brand relevant but makes it a beacon for all segments of your audience. For us, that’s meant working to unpack the future of health and medicine, a field that continues to innovate faster than ever before.