Cerba Research - Collective Focus
Building a global health brand from the inside out.
Cerba Research is a leading medical research company, providing specialist services for global pharmaceutical and biotech clinical trials from a network of more than 1,000 labs and 85 million patients across five continents.
Despite its size, Cerba Research had a primitive brand identity and a logo imposed by its parent company with no strategy or messaging guidelines. Moreover, they were rapidly acquiring other companies to expand their capabilities,
each with their own identities and culture.
Our challenge was to define a brand identity to tell the Cerba story and resonate with both employees and customers, unifying the business under a cohesive positioning to guide their beliefs and behaviours into the future.
Research created our benchmark
It was vital to understand perceptions, experiences and hopes for the future among Cerba’s customers, employees and leadership. We held a series of workshops with these groups, helping us form detailed customer personas with distinct needs, expectations and pain points.
A Cultural Values Assessment (CVA) with all 1,000+ employees was also conducted, which highlighted a lack of any shared internal culture across siloed departments and companies with no sense of pride in their work.
Out of this research, we shaped Cerba’s ‘Meaningful Difference’ – including their brand purpose and values – into something that resonates with both internal and external audiences.
From a core platform of ‘Transforming research, advancing health together’, we developed more patient- and customer-centric value propositions for the brand’s key services and different therapeutic areas.
A new North Star.
The new brand purpose and values encompass every function and specialism within Cerba, uniting disparate companies and their people at every level for the first time.
While we could not change the existing logo, we focused on bringing it to life in distinctive ways, evolving a sterile colour palette to be warmer and animating the ‘dots’ from the logo to make their communications more dynamic.
The ‘collective focus’ campaign was developed to make the explicit link between what Cerba does and how this helps individuals around the world live longer, healthier lives. This is now extending into Cerba’s first flagship sponsorship at the World Vaccine Congress in the US and ongoing thought leadership communications.
We developed the new brand framework and its guidelines into a series of internal communications initiatives, including:
- Regular town hall meetings with senior leadership championing the new brand culture and values
- Structured education and storytelling workshops
- ‘Connecting the dots’ to encourage staff to identify
and celebrate their values - Values-led ‘mindfulness cards’ to help employees care
for their mental health - New branded workspace designs throughout their offices featuring Cerba staff within the new visual identity
These have galvanised a new sense of pride and momentum within the organisation and activated Cerba’s creativity, teamwork and commercial focus.
Nearly a year into the implementation of this new identity, AgencyUK has become an extension of Cerba’s key marketing teams, developing internal and external initiatives across all channels for diverse audiences.
Our work in action.
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