Swiss major Novartis is leaning on its roots as it launches a new look for the company after this year’s Sandoz spin-off and pipeline refocus.
The refresh does not, like its peers, entail a new logo, but does update its design. This “draws on our Swiss design heritage and uses biomorphic shapes, a fluid design, color transitions, warm imagery and a clear, relatable tone to communicate where science meets the human side of medicine,” the company told Fierce Pharma Marketing in a statement.
This sees new shapes and warmer colors throughout its corporate websites and social media that tap the original colors of its logo: red, blue and yellow, but then also moves beyond them.
The rebranding is accompanied by a new video, shared by its CEO, Vas Narasimhan. The video dives into the narrative history of the company and highlights the transformation it has undergone to become what it is today. Additionally, there is a change in its tagline. The 2016 message, "Reimagining medicine," evolves into "Reimagining medicine together" for 2023 and beyond. This new tagline emphasizes the collaborative efforts with partners, healthcare systems and patients.
“We’ve been in the midst of a multi-year transformation, and this was a good opportunity to rethink how we present our corporate brand,” explained Sreejit Mohan, Global Head of Corporate Brand Strategy and External Engagement, in an interview with Fierce Pharma Marketing.
Novartis decided to spin off Sandoz last year and completed this in October, with the idea being to focus more on the medicine business, following similar plans from GSK and J&J, which also spun out their consumer units for much the same reason.
Back in April of this year, Novartis also decided to dump or out-license 10% of its R&D projects to narrow its sights on five core therapeutic areas and focus investment on its most promising programs within those spaces.
Those therapeutic areas include cardiovascular, hematology, solid tumors, immunology and neuroscience, and a small clutch of technology platforms, which now form the focus of its R&D activities.
“The fundamental shift is in the overall brand positioning and the brand promise,” Mohan said. He explained that Novartis has been “heavily” leaning its branding into its science and innovation areas, but the pharma was doing more outside of these areas in terms of “engaging stakeholders, doing partnerships and tackling broader issues in healthcare.”
Novartis’ work here “wasn’t really coming through,” however, but its research found that these are the areas that its stakeholders wanted to see more of for a pharma: i.e., going beyond solutions just from medicines.
So, the idea was to combine the science with patient needs and focus on the impact this can have.
Mohan said this was the starting point: Novartis then sat down and asked itself how it can show this visually, as well as in its communications approach. “We came up with biomorphic shapes,” Mohan said.
“This comes from the world of design and architecture, and what we played with was the concept of the circle to show fluidity and the need for partners.” That circular shape also conforms to the human cell and having partners around a roundtable.
The now Novartis-wide color scheme conforms to the coloring of its logo, mainly the orange and the blue, and then Mohan said Novartis “built it out from there to the primary colors, which includes the navy, orange and amber.”
There are also secondary colors that will come up in different settings. “This can be an opportunity for us to partner with other parts of the Novartis group, such as marketing, to see if we can use color as a differentiator in some of these marketing communications as well.”
Unlike its Big Pharma peers, Novartis decided against changing its logo. “There was a strong internal conviction that there is a lot of equity in the Novartis brand and logo,” Mohan said. This is especially true when you look internationally, he explained, including core European markets, but also in China and Japan, where the logo and branding have a lot of “awareness and trust”, Mohan added.
“So, when we went into these changes, we knew early on we wanted to retain that.”
Novartis appears to be following a Big Pharma theme here. Pfizer, Sanofi, GSK and most recently J&J have all in the past two years decided to shake up their corporate branding, with new logos, new digital designs and new messaging.
Many companies, including Sanofi and GSK especially, tapped the tech world for inspiration with their new designs, and it comes as pharma companies emerge from their self-imposed darkness and decide to show themselves more.
This is opposed to showing just their products, which had been the standard operating procedure for decades.
Much of this transformation occurred in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, during which the pharmaceutical industry gained increased credibility and visibility in the eyes of the public. However, Mohan clarified that this period of change predates the pandemic.
“But while we saw this shift before COVID, the pandemic was a big factor and an accelerant for pharma to pay attention to the corporate brand,” Mohan said.
An agency was used for the new branding, but Mohan did not want to discuss the cost of these changes.