How Creative Symbols Can Help Us Do Great Work In Healthcare Advertising
Healthcare ads are widely considered to be some of worst creative work in all of advertising. As a generality, I won’t argue with this. Most creative work in healthcare is generic — it’s smiling older people doing moderately strenuous activities like hiking and kayaking. But there is something that healthcare brands can do to make their work stand out and be more effective: develop a creative symbol.
I wrote an article almost two years ago on why it’s so hard to do great creative work in healthcare advertising. The reasons included: every healthcare ad selling normalcy which limits the ability for a differentiating promise, the fear from brand teams and agencies that their work will be seen as inappropriate for a serious disease, all pharma ads needing fair balance which makes them all feel similar, and the heavy regulation of healthcare ads by the FDA. The regulation actually goes deeper than just the creative work, there are even strict guidelines about what a pharma brand can be named (with longer and less familiar names being favored by the FDA). All of this makes it difficult for healthcare brands to stand out and be remembered by consumers.
One thing the FDA doesn’t regulate though, are creative symbols. By creative symbol, I don’t mean a logo, I mean an iconic creative element that can be featured in creative work and become inextricably linked with the brand. Cialis is a great example of a healthcare brand with a creative symbol. Cialis’ debut ad featured a couple relaxing in two separate bathtubs which became an iconic symbol for the brand and one of the major reasons it was able to overtake Viagra in the ED market (those two bathtubs are now in the healthcare company’s marketing hall-of-fame). There are a couple of other good examples of creative symbols in healthcare — Nexium has the purple pill, Spiriva had the elephant — but too few healthcare brands use a creative symbol to their advantage.
Non-healthcare brands have been using creative symbols for a long time. Tony the Tiger, Tucan Sam, the Kool-Aid Man, the Pillsbury Doughboy, and the Energizer Bunny (just to name a few) have all helped their brands achieve tremendous success in very crowded markets. These examples are brand characters, in addition to being creative symbols, but they serve the same purpose: they’re an immediately recognizable shortcut for the brand.
The power of creative symbols in healthcare advertising can be immense. A creative symbol is something that consumers can draw on to remember the brand later, it can be used in shorter-form media like a banner ad or brochure (after being used on TV) and have instant recall among consumers, it can be used by consumers to bring up a therapy to a doctor without having to remember its complicated name, it can help a brand stand out in a sea of shiny-happy-patients, and it can even make people feel good about the brand.
In that previous article I wrote about why it’s so hard to do great work in healthcare, I stopped short of actually proposing a solution. But now I have at least one answer: develop a creative symbol. Healthcare advertising is hard enough as it is and we in the industry spend considerable time trying to find ways to be innovative, to be just as creative as the best non-healthcare brands, and ultimately to be more effective. Developing a creative symbol is one great way we can do it.