Step 2 and 3: Brand awareness and positioning workshop

This is where we dive into the positioning workshop. You and your team will want to institute what we call a Firestarter branding workshop. This requires the proper prep work, including studying the cases in Step 1. You will want to define what elements to use as a baseline; they should be in these areas:

What are the customer's passions? Delve deep into all the research to pull out the key emotional, diagnostic, treatment, and prescribing insights along with beliefs around your brand and your competitors.

Your own brand is what's going to move minds and build loyalty. At this point, delve deep into the brand's features, benefits, data, and anything else it offers.

With this background work completed, the workshop would entail discovering a rational and emotional connection for the brand and the customers. One exercise can explore every potential avenue that the brand can own. Remember, there are hundreds of different ways to position—by attribute, benefit, cost, patient type, line of treatment, etc. The key is to find an exercise that allows you to uncover each potential avenue in a timely manner—this is a simple one- to two-hour exercise, not a week's worth of exploring. Another critical part of the workshop day is a personality exercise; one that allows you to explore how your brand would behave, as that is critical to gaining an emotional connection with the audience. Again, this is a simple one- to two-hour exercise.

This one-day workshop will have you seeing the writing on the walls (literally) for the brand.

Step 4: Ask for help

Workshops are most successful when you collaborate with experts in their discipline. The workshop should include all disciplines: marketing, medical, legal, sales force, and agency partners. Let's remember, the more you talk through your nightmares and fears, the higher the chance that you can turn them into a dream come true.

Don't let a future indication approval be your brand's nightmare.

Yaron Landow is SVP, Drector of Strategic Services and Business Development, Flashpoint Medica. He can be reached at Yaron.Landow@flashpointmedica.com