BIO Recap: The Sea of Sameness in Full Effect in Boston [Video Podcast]

In this SCORRCAST video, recorded on the final day of BIO 2025 in Boston, hear real-time reflections on the overwhelming brand "sameness" seen across the show floor. Get insights on what stood out, what didn’t, and how life sciences companies can break away from generic messaging and make a lasting impact.

Transcript

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Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. To anyone that is listening to this. I am recording this on Thursday morning in my hotel room on what is the fourth and final day of BIO 2025 I hope that you're listening to this Thursday, Friday while you're traveling, or if you're listening to this the following week. Thank you for tuning in. This is a special edition of the SCORR cast, where we are kind of give some real time and live, if you will, feedback from the show floor over the last handful of days. And I have to say, it was a really impressive show. Once again, I think bio did a great job in San Diego in 2024 had a lot of feedback about how the setup of the structure of the floor plan, and a little bit tighter knit in 2025 what was was really beneficial to a lot of teams. So I'm excited to talk a little bit about that. Talk a little bit about some of the problems that we were hearing on the show floor. SCORR was represented by myself and then two of our account team members, Alyssa Greiner and Stevie gelden, and we were on the show floor, having conversations, reviewing some of the more entertaining booths, reviewing some of some of the issues that we have in the industry when it comes to trade show booths, and then also having conversations with our prospects, our clients, and hearing from them, not only about the trade show but also about what their biggest challenges are right now in marketing in 2025 and there's really two that stood out. The first one is, we're going to continue to talk about this, the messaging, the sea of sameness. This is a complicated market. This is not just a fluff thing that I am saying. I'm not talking about brand messaging. I'm not talking about brand story, because I think that you have to have this, you know, beautiful and sexy rebrand. I'm talking about brand messaging and brand story. Because if you are not able to cut through the clutter, if you are not able to succinctly say, here's what we do, here's the capacity that we have, here's the expertise that we have, the specialty that we're in, and here's why it should freaking matter to you. You're not going to be in that top three. You're not going to be in that top five. And ultimately, that's what we want. That's what we absolutely have to have, and that's what marketing should be. And so what we did as a little thought exercise, I'm going to pull up my phone here. We, all of us, walked the show for and and kind of calculated out the number of times we saw certain phrases. And at the end of the day, we had a total of about 45 of these bunches. And so we had experienced experts, just having that as the main thing, expert, cdmo, your expert partner, things like that, had 12 total interactions, or 12 total boosts that had that as the main message, just the flat out partner being the main message, had 13. We had 12 of the One Stop Shop full service, end to end. We had 11 of the concept to commercialization, or concept to x, and then we had an extra nine. So it actually is closer to 50 total that had the trusted reliable as that main core message. And I've gotta, I've gotta, at least say, you know, I understand some of the trusted reliable angle. It's just not for me. I think trusted is, is a table stakes. But I do want to read off a couple a couple of these, your end to end biologic cdmo, your your premier cdmo, your cdmo Partner, all under one roof, pre clinical to commercial, your cdmo Partner, cdmo expertise, trusted support your biolog. Your trust is biological cdmo partner. I like your friendly cdmo There. There are some benefits to what we are talking about. And i i to being that specific and I or to not being that specific, I understand that you are playing it safe a little bit with our messaging. And hey, if we say we're an end to end cdmo, if we say we're a one stop shop, or we just say we're, you know, a biologic cdmo, there's not a lot that comes after that. There's not a lot of questions. I'm certainly not going to be instantly stopped on the show floor to have a conversation with you. If I'm not familiar with you already, I'm going to be relying on my brand equity. I'm relying on, you know, my business development team members, my sales team members, to really be able to build that out. And it can work. It can especially work if you are a larger player in the space who is automatically top of mind, I'd still make an argument that you need to have better messaging, but we have to start to nail in and dial in on what is going to actually separate us in the market. And again, I think this is super important, that. We are not talking here in in terms of it has to be something that is so flashy, or something completely out of the ballpark. I completely understand that sometimes, when I am talking about the rebrand process or the messaging process that we we get that kind of look of, look of, well, we don't want to do that. We don't want to go through a full rebrand. We don't want to go through the, you know, the entire updating of our messaging and of our visuals. And I'm not just specifically talking about that, and I'm also not talking about it in terms of, oh, it's a nice to have. I'm talking about that this as a brand message is a is something that needs to be on the top of your list before the end of 2025 if you do not feel confident in that message, buyers are asking completely different questions than ever before, and you have to be able to communicate to the needs that they're looking for. You have to be able to communicate that you can solve their problem, that you have the capacity to bring to solve their problem, that you have stability, that you have the people inside your organization that give you that power to say, hey, not only are we here right now? Not only to have capacity today, but our leadership is in place, and we're going to have we're going to have capacity, and we're going to continue to grow with you over the next couple of years. And then you have to be more specialized. You have to have that unique value proposition. I was on the show floor, and I was able to catch up with Heather Sugrue over at Chrysalis Bio. We're actually going to be recording a podcast on Monday, following the show. So this is even going to be more commentary around the concept of marketing and business development. But then certainly, what does the message play? You know? How does that message play a role? And we talked about it right then and there. We talk about all the time in terms of, you have to have that golden ticket. You have to have that nugget. What is that unique selling proposition? What is that unique value proposition, and why does that matter to your target audience? And so I think that again, this ended up, this is now a an absolute rant that I am going on. I think the only other thing that I would say is when we went through and we found 40-50, of these companies that had very similar messaging or very similar approaches. You then go the step deeper. You go through the second and third pages on their website, or you talk to an individual there, and they don't have the same value proposition. They either are in one part of the industry, they have a specific specialization, whether they're working within GLP ones or they're within they're they're on, they're on the peptide side of things. They're in cell therapy. They're in cell and gene therapy. They're in gene therapy, like there are these companies are not the same, and you are doing yourself a disservice if you try to blend in. And blending in is not, not the way to go. And you know, we talked about it on the the website, we talked about it on the LinkedIn, we talked about on the show for it's really, really crowded. You've got 13 to 15 seconds, you've got to you've got what we call a big idea, you've got a core headline with some secondary messaging before people move on. And so how can we be really specific with that? How can we go out and make a difference and make an impact in that way? And I think that needs to be the focus for a lot of organizations moving forward. So I took a took a little eight minute detour there that was number one, that topic. I had a couple conversations on the show floor about it, just in terms of that topic specifically, and how rampant that conversation is. In 2025 I make the joke that in 2024 when I brought up, you know, some of the sea of sameness stuff, and how every single booth says the same thing, I kind of got a, kind of got a cold shoulder and said, No, no, that's not of interest to us. Now, it's all anybody wants to talk about. And I think that we're seeing more and more of this, where when you walk the show floor, you're seeing a lot of companies similar to you. When you walk the show floor, you're seeing a lot of companies that say that they can do the same thing as you. And so now we're asking those questions, what are we doing to be different? What are we doing to stand out? And if you aren't standing out, if you don't have a brand position, if you don't have a brand story that helps you, and it really, really articulates the company that not only you are with, the company that your customers and your clients need, you're missing out, and you leave money on the table. So that's number one. That's number one. Number two. Number two here is, well, number two is, is the marketing and business development relationship, again, big commentary here around the pipeline and marketing and business development teams not only working together that that's a. Part of this, but it was also, how do we hand off? How do we set up a structure where we have marketing we have marketing leads, or we have marketing influence, potential leads, and then we're able to pass them off? And you know, we might have that a good structure, and the actual leads aren't coming in. And so how do we build the right methods so that when marketing is delivering, we are able to pass those leads off to sales, and then we are able to stay in touch and understand was that a good lead, is that lead now in an active opportunity, is there an RFP? Is there $1 amount associated? Are we talking to the right person at the right company, or is it the right company, wrong person, right company, right person, wrong time. These are the types of conversations that more and more teams are starting to have at the commercial level to really integrate marketing and sales at the same on the same team and at the same infrastructure. And I say all the time. You know, revenue is a team game. It takes the first touch point, it takes the 50th touch point, the 250th touch point, the 1000 touch point from everybody on the team, operations, client, success, finance, whoever it might be, procurement, they all are involved in this brand and this relationship revenue is a team game. But specifically, we need marketing and business development to be working on the same page. And if they're not working on the same page. You're going to see that. You're going to see those cracks. You're going to see you're going to see that you run an event and there's no follow through to the event. You're going to see that, you know, we're making last minute claims for the trade show or last minute adjustments for the trade show. You're going to see that there is a lack of nurture following a trade show, or from an event where we don't instantly know, Hey, these are the types of people that were coming to the event. This is the type of of nurture that we want to create. Here's the content that we have. And so it was really interesting conversation, because it was both at a high level in terms of setting up the structure, but also at the granular level in terms of, how do we set up that if we're running content and we're targeting, you know, the the North American audience, or even the East Coast audience versus the West Coast versus, you know, somebody that's more in Europe, or specific based by, you know, early phase or, or, you know, phase one, phase two, or again, you Talk about the different modalities within being a CDMO, if they're if they're consuming this type of content, how do we ensure that they stay within this pipeline? How do we ensure that they stay within this funnel with quality content? And then our sales team knows, what are those triggers for them to go from a marketing contact to a marketing lead, to a marketing prospect to a sales prospect to a qualified like, what do you have right? And I say all the time that there's no standard, there's no right way. The right way is what works for you. I'm a very simple like, Hey, this is a potential. It becomes a marketing qualified lead, boom. It now becomes a sales qualified lead, and now we're a sales qualified opportunity, marketing lead, sales qualified lead sales, qualified opportunity. That to me, is as simple as it needs to be. You can freaking get as fancy as you want within your CRM, within your databases. But the problem is, is that if you get really fancy, you have to also follow it up. So I think that is a really, really important piece. And again, it doesn't matter if you have a great brand and have a great brand and have a great message, but off that follow through, if we don't have that sales and marketing relationship that ultimately we are, we are going to continue to be unsuccessful as well. So I've got more, more feedback coming, more content coming. I've got my wonderful INCOG hat here, actually a really solid, really solid truckers hat that I'm going to use for runs. There were a couple of really fun, fun, fun items on the trade show. Bio always does a really great job. But I do have to give a shout out to the team over at the the Ohio pavilion that had the vending machine where you click the button, you scan the QR code, you picked your soda, you liked them on Facebook or on LinkedIn. You followed their page on on LinkedIn, and then you got the the soda. There it was. It was a really clever approach. And more and more teams need to look at those interactive ways to build strategy, interactive ways to to really be able to create an impact on the show floor. Thank you so much. Guys. Hope that this was the very least a little bit of initial initial recap and interest of everybody. If you have more questions about how the show went, just reach out.