In the branding of Xiidra, the ii’s have it

 

 

Shire Inc. last week launched Xiidra, the first medicine indicated for the signs and symptoms of dry eye disease and the company’s first ophthalmic drug. The company worked with Digitas Health LifeBrands on consumer and professional campaigns with a unified look and feel. Outside of those efforts, there’s a patient education campaign, EYELOVE, featuring actress Jennifer Aniston, which Shire also worked on with Digitas Health.

According to Victoria Noble, head of marketing, ophthalmics, at Shire, “Creatively and strategically, we came from a different place than a lot of brands come from in pharma.”

“We’re really disciplined to make sure that this was a brand, one brand, one voice, for both of our customers—eye care professionals as well as consumers—and a brand that can break through, get the awareness that a launch brand needs to get, but also get high connectivity and engagement with our customers,” Noble says.

The campaigns focus on the ii’s in the name of the drug. “The double i’s became a creative mandatory in everything that we did and do,” Noble says. “And you’ll see from the campaign that we used it in appropriate ways. ‘Say Hii’ is our introductory mantra, hi with a double i. And through the life of this brand, we will continue to lean in on the playfulness and the smartness of the double i, which claims back immediately to our brand name.”

On the consumer side, Shire is focusing on women, ages 4o t0 60, and on the professional side, “we speak equally to the optometrist as well as the ophthalmologist,” Noble says.

One of the branding elements for the campaigns is a game app called BLiiP.

“A lot of brands want an app, particularly healthcare brands, who are very interested in an app to drive behavior change, most importantly, adherence,” Noble says. “That was an opportunity for us to do that, but we know a lot of apps are downloaded and then used only once or twice. We took a step back and said what do we want as a brand, what do our customers really want from an app? And what we want on app as a brand is to get engagement with our customers, to be in front of them and drive brand awareness and engagement. And our customers, they love gaming, they love community and connectivity, and a little bit of nostalgia, so we took those inputs and went back to one of the founding games, which is PONG.”

The app is available in the Google and Apple app stores.

BLiiP “really leans in our double i’s,” Nobel says. “It’s a big part of who we are, it will be in our booth, it’s in front of our eye care professionals, it’s part of our consumer campaign. And it will drive awareness and connectivity.”

According to Collette Douai, VP, group creative director at Digitas Health, when researching the target audience and their gaming preferences, “nostalgia was something they resonated with.”

“And as any creative house would do, we saw a wonderful opportunity to bring in the double i’s in the Pong way,” Douai says. “We carried that branding right from the name to how the game is played. So not only is it a naming convention, but it’s a way to interact with the double ii’s themselves, give women a break, and have a little fun, and lean in on nostalgia. It’s been very well received.”

Although focused on consumers and professionals, BLiiP also has found a welcome from Shire’s sales people.

“It’s very addictive,” Noble says. “We had a launch meeting when we introduced the campaign to our salesforce, where we had the world premiere of BLiiP, and they were first to play it. As you can imagine, sales people are pretty competitive, it was a pretty fantastic night. There is a competitive vibe in all of us, and this kind of pokes at it.”

Even outside the game, “When we set out to make this more of a consumer brand that cuts across all audiences, we wanted to make sure we entered the space as one brand, one voice, one look and feel,” Noble says. “When you look at the materials, even sometimes I have to re-read them and say is this for the professional side of our customer base, or is this for the consumer? Because the nuance is really in some of the language, but the look and the feel is all under the double i campaign.”

According to Noble, “The double i’s gave us the confidence that we could go out there with one great big brand voice. And many of the eye-care professionals, the optometrists and the ophthalmologists, are also part of our consumer target, which is the 40 to 60 female. So we didn’t necessarily want to have two different campaigns out there.”

There are some differentiating elements in the campaigns, however. For about 200 KOLs, the company put together a welcome kit, or “experience box,” each with six 30-day samples of Xiidra. But instead of being cold and clinical, Shire and Digitas Health aimed to give the kit designs the feel of something from Apple, and tie them into the overall “Niice to Meet You” tagline of both campaigns.

“They were very well received and the doctors were spontaneously taking pictures of themselves with the ‘Niice to Meet You’ box, sending them back to us and posting them in social media,” Noble says. “That’s exactly the connectivity and positivity that we wanted.”