The healthcare category is in transition. Pharmaceutical brands are not only facing increased competition from their own industry, but they also have to fend off the advances of hugely powerful consumer lifestyle brands who are encroaching on their territory. Healthcare is increasingly becoming a lifestyle category in its own right and – to maintain that all-important status and success – pharmaceutical brands now have to become aspirational consumer brands. As a result, the role of creativity and design has never been more pivotal.
We are seeing a host of cultural and socio attitudes driving this change: new markets and laws are opening up opportunities in what was previously a more restricted sector, people are taking ownership of their own health, and looking for ways to optimize it, and new innovations are challenging the norms of health as we know it. It doesn’t just come down to new brand and product design – although technology and wearables such as Fitbit have seemingly revolutionized the category overnight. Most significantly, new competitors are opening up health and traditional pharma with exciting and disrupting visual codes – in everything from food to supplements and cosmeceuticals. But there is also a new challenge breed, rising up within the pharma industry itself, innovating with design integrated into their business to powerfully redefine its look and a new future direction.
Previously, orthodoxy seems to have dictated that pain relief, for example, has to follow a corporate and bland format. Nurofen focused on a master brand for all types of pain but the visual codes and cues still focus on the pain with hard reds and ‘target’ icons and the design in no way visually addresses the cure. Advil redesigned a couple of years ago to reflect its new fast-acting technology, introducing devices to signify speed and a white carton to signal a premium offer. But, overall, the pain relief sector remains clinical, clichéd and sanitized.
It was Help Remedies that pretty much single-handedly turned this sector on its head, truly challenging the status quo by moving us from pain to gain. The primary color-coding, forthright and personal straplines and embossed packaging – a visual reinforcement of what the product is for – maintains function and convenience but, above all, is aesthetically pleasing and emotionally connected. It’s about finding the balance and using design to impart selected information in a defined but personable way.
