Emergent BioSolutions
Travel health vaccines that traded fear for savvy.
The insight
Travel health marketing that traded fear for savvy. Three phases on an unbranded platform, each funded by the results of the last.
Employment: Eveo, a healthcare communication agency (acquired by Capgemini Invent). Deliverables: social contest campaign · brand identity and style guide · site redesign · social, email and SMS creative · newsletter · branded mini-site and brochures.
Challenge
Challenge
Emergent BioSolutions needed its unbranded travel health platform, TravelHealthConnect.com, to do real commercial work: build an audience of international travelers, earn their trust, and create a credible pathway from awareness to the company's branded travel vaccines.
Research told us the barrier wasn't awareness. Travelers knew the risks existed; they believed the risks belonged to someone else. Travel health marketing responds to under-preparation by raising the alarm. But optimism bias doesn't yield to a stronger warning. It deflects one, because the warning is always about somebody else.
Solution
Proof first, ask second.
Confidence was the one thing we couldn't argue with, so we recruited it instead. The experienced traveler isn't the one who never gets sick. She's the one who knows what to do. We sold travel health as a mark of the savvy traveler. The campaign was Destination Healthy, a Facebook and Instagram contest for the best travel health tips, with the tagline “Before you explore the world, explore TravelHealthConnect.”
Every presentation opened with measured results from the phase just completed, then moved to the creative for the phase being proposed. Phase 1 built traffic and community (4.6M site impressions; $1M Phase 2 added). Phase 2 rebranded the site with a postcard-inspired visual system (3.4M impressions; 5k travel guide downloads; $1M+ Phase 3 added). Phase 3 built the pathway to branded vaccine consideration, with live CDC and WHO outbreak feeds supplying the credibility: borrowed credibility on the facts, our own voice on everything else.
Mid-engagement I took the client relationship over directly, slowed down, and rebuilt the review structure around proof rather than persuasion.
Result
Overall outcome
Partway through Phase 3, Emergent moved its marketing strategy fully to branded, the direction the pathway had been pointing. The unbranded platform had done what it was built to do. Phases funded by the one before: 3 of 3.
Travelers don't wake up thinking about typhoid vaccines. They wake up excited about their destination. Meeting that mindset, rather than correcting it, created a natural entry point to the health conversation.
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