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Market Design for Your Science Brand

Science and creativity have never been strange bedfellows, and yet there’s something stuffy in today’s modern sense of science. Marketers in this industry should align design trends with brand identity, and can do so with creative distinction unique to science and technology.

Animate Science Illustrations

Video is trending in a way that changes the marketing game. Web design, content and social media presentation should all include video elements as part of their design. For science and tech brands, breaking down complex concepts into visual stories through animations is both informative and captures attention.

By simplifying complex concepts, you make your product or service more accessible. Not only that, it clarifies your marketing communications to your desired audience in a short amount of time. Say more with less in a visually striking way by using video in your marketing design.

Data Visualization

Demonstrate insight with data sets. Pictures are still worth a thousand words. Bring data visualization into your videos, and use those graphics elsewhere in your content materials to reinforce the concepts that are most important to your audience.

Specific to design considerations, keep data assets visually easy to digest. Consolidate a lot of data into the action-oriented takeaways, and simplify when able. You can always link to citations in digital assets that provide further analysis.

Finally, use data to tell a memorable story useful to your audience on behalf of your brand. It’s about your audience, not about you. If you tell the story in a compelling way, the audience will see your brand as facilitating and representing their interests. Data should be representative of your audience; design the graphics in a way that makes it clear how and why they’re represented.

Connect Concept with Humanity

Marketing generally requires us to connect with our audience. Upon first glance, it may seem that cold, scientific facts make it more difficult to connect in a meaningful way, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Science is all about solving problems! Problems only exist because humans are interacting with stimulus and discovering unwanted, unnecessary or deficient outcomes. Science solves these things. You aren’t just creating medical accessories; you’re making cookies with grandma because her quality of life is improved. You aren’t just constructing composite building materials; you’re building homes that can sustain generations of people while protecting organic resources.

Connect your brand with the solution it creates, and tell that story through video and content design. Represent the humans behind the tech in both paid and organic placements. As you design different elements, consider why it’s necessary and who it helps. This is the opportunity to connect with your audience on an emotional level.

Showcase Diversity and Equity

Human problems are diverse problems, and you can only understand them if you look at them from more than one perspective. Science has always required the collective brainpower of humanity’s brightest. Diversity isn’t a buzzword, it’s experience. Sometimes it’s based on race or gender experience but can include everything from education to socioeconomic status. Diverse experience influences who we are and what we do and how we solve problems.

Diversity is baked into science because each experience leads to questions that need solutions. From a design standpoint, you should showcase your teams and demonstrate how varied those experiences are. Represent your audience, organizational leaders and brand representatives. Who do you serve? How are you getting their buy-in?

Finally, and this is more content-driven, demonstrate why diversity and equity matters to your brand, your product or service, and what you’re doing to make things better. Don’t just use {your desired diversity segment} in an ad. You can do better.

Don’t Be Afraid to Be Bold

We mean this literally. Remember when we said science can be stuffy? Turn the imagined visual on its head. Literally use bold colors, fonts and other design elements. Images and animations should also be visually bold to capture attention, and even imagination.

Follow your MLR requirements, but science does bold things! If you have to be muted in your own claims, stand on the shoulders of giants. Tell a story from historical precedent using bold language, and convince your audience that you are part of that legacy.

Alright nerds, go forth and conquer. We’re part of that club and we love working with tech and science brands. If marketing isn’t your forte, let us do the heavy lifting so you can keep doing what you do best. We want you to solve problems, we’ll help you get the word out. Contact us here.