Medical & MedTech / Sep 29, 2024

Branding in MedTech

Rachael Sparks

Director, Medical Brands

The Competitive Advantage Everyone's Ignoring

Branding in the MedTech industry, while often under-appreciated, plays a crucial role in your company's success. It's how you communicate your business, values, look and feel, and promise to your stakeholders. Yet, it remains overlooked due to our laser focus on technical and clinical data. We assume our product's performance will speak loud enough — but that's not always the case. Here's the thing: two products with nearly identical clinical outcomes don't sell identically. One becomes the category standard. The other becomes a line item. The difference? Branding.

Why MedTech Companies Struggle With Branding

The healthcare space operates under a unique set of constraints that make branding easy to deprioritize. Structured purchasing processes emphasize clinical value, safety, and ROI — all of which are critical metrics, and rightfully so. When you're making decisions that affect patient outcomes, the clinical data better be bulletproof. The problem? Branding gets caught in the crossfire.

The impact of branding can be difficult to measure immediately, making it challenging for companies to justify investing in brand initiatives when you can clearly quantify the efficacy of your device or therapeutic. But this thinking is like saying "we don't need to invest in patient communication, the medicine works." It does work. But does anyone know it works? Do they trust that you're the company to deliver it?

Here's the deeper issue: MedTech decision-making isn't purely rational, even though stakeholders think it is. Yes, hospital procurement teams run RFPs. Yes, they compare clinical data. But guess what influences which products make it into that comparison set in the first place? Brand awareness. Recommendation credibility. Perceived market leadership. When a cardiologist hears "that's the gold standard device," they're not pulling clinical trials in real-time, they're drawing on brand perception built over years.

When companies overlook branding, they miss out on three critical opportunities: differentiation in a marketplace where technical specs are often commoditized, credibility-building that accelerates adoption timelines, and emotional connection with end-users (physicians, nurses, patients) who are tired of generic, clinical-speak messaging.

The Measurement Myth

Let's address the elephant in the room: "We can't measure branding ROI." Wrong. You're measuring it wrong. You can't always trace a $2M rebrand directly to Q4 revenue. But you can measure brand awareness lift, consideration shifts, customer acquisition cost reduction, and (this is critical) price elasticity. A strong brand allows you to command premium pricing. It reduces sales cycle length. It increases customer retention. These are measurable. They just require looking beyond the quarterly earnings call.

The Power of a Brand (And What Happens When You Ignore It)

Consider PDI, which has achieved something most companies only dream of: a brand so embedded in healthcare culture that people don't even call it by its name anymore. Hospital teams refer to those color-coded disinfectant wipe canisters as "gold tops" or "purple tops." The brand is so locked in that it transcends the product itself. This is category ownership.

But here's where it gets interesting — and slightly tragic. PDI once launched a pale-blue-lidded version with genuinely improved efficacy. Objectively better. But it underperformed. Why? Because the brand promise was visually broken. The market had trained itself to trust gold and purple. A new color introduced confusion, even if the clinical data was superior. This is what happens when you build a brand so strong that deviating from it — even with valid reasons — creates friction.

In MedTech, trust is oxygen. Providers and patients need to know your solutions are safe, effective, and reliable. Strong branding isn't window dressing — it's the mechanism that shortcuts the trust-building process. Instead of every hospital requiring six months of internal validation, your brand reputation does part of that heavy lifting upfront.

Beyond the Clinical: The Narrative That Sticks

Here's what most MedTech companies miss: branding allows you to tell your company's story in a way that clinical data simply cannot. Technical specifications and peer-reviewed trial results matter enormously, but they rarely connect with your audience on a human level. They don't explain why your company exists. They don't show the patient who got their life back. They don't highlight the surgeon who sleeps better knowing they're using your device.

A well-crafted brand narrative bridges that gap. It contextualizes your clinical excellence within a larger story about impact, innovation, and human outcomes. It makes your company relatable and creates a memorable brand experience that becomes the lens through which stakeholders interpret your data.

The result? A brand that converts. And in MedTech, that's everything.

We help Medical & MedTech companies brand, rebrand, and telling compelling stories.

Rachael Sparks

Director, Medical Brands