We are living in a time when the pharmaceutical industry is more in the spotlight than ever. Global supply chains are reeling, brand reputation has never been more important, and consumers from all walks of life are being more and more vocal around what they expect from the brands and companies they are engaging with. Change is happening at a rapid pace, and even the pharma industry is being called to step up their game, adapt, and keep their brands in-line with these changing times and consumer expectations.
Where it all began
Back when we first started out in the industry, we knew we needed to play it safe in terms of our brand and identity. We looked at our well established competitors, and carved out an identity based on the inspiration we found around us. Safe colour palettes and minimal, clinical design systems. We wanted our stakeholders to see us as a secure, safe and reliable option next to our competitors, and cast aside any preconceived notions that may arise when remarking our youth and experience.
We played it conservative, and it worked. Over the last few years, and after over 1000 successfully completed audits and counting, we have bypassed many of our competitors in terms of audit volume, experience, auditor network and more. But we knew that although we were still the safe, reliable brand we designed ourselves to be perceived as, there was much more to us than our blue and grey brand palette communicated. We’d built our success on our high-quality service experience, the personable approach of our team, and our innovative attitude and future-forward mindset. So we decided we needed our branding to represent exactly that. We wanted all of our brand touch points, both digital, print and beyond, to represent what made us special. An effortless user experience. Clear, transparent and easy-to-digest information delivered in a format that was stakeholder centric. And we wanted to breathe new life into the Pharma industry. To push back on the traditional model of Pharma marketing and deliver our stakeholders a brand that reimagined what it looked like to be an audit provider, so we got to work.
Our design systems
When it came to creating our design systems, our goal was to hero our human-centric positioning, and bring a more emotional connection to an otherwise technical and bureaucratic industry. The approach was designed to lighten up meticulous, complex processes and promote the ideas of innovation, curated data and human relations as an integral part of the work we do in our sector, while continuing to guarantee rigour and quality throughout.
Our brand positioning
With these ideas in mind, we developed the strategic foundations that would shape Qualifyze’s new brand positioning. We set a clear direction, one that would make a statement about who we were, what we believed, and mark our future as a company: To build the trust layer for global supply chains; and with it, we began building a discourse that underlined our ambition of being a breath of fresh air in our industry: We don’t just deliver compliance to our clients, we also provide meaningful value that goes beyond. Beyond just auditing. We put human relationships at the centre of our rebranding process, and went deep into the day to day of our clients, auditors and Auditees to get in-depth insights and ensure we were building a brand that didn’t just make sense to us, but also to our stakeholders.
Our visual identity
We decided to work on the visual identity as a fundamental communication tool for this new positioning, and really build out the “breath of fresh air” idea from a concept, to a feeling. To that end, we defined a series of visual elements inspired by each of the benefits that we defined as most differentiating Qualifyze from our competitors: the ability to streamline and optimise processes, to interpret and organise data for that purpose and to pave the way for the future of Pharma auditing.
We made all that tangible with the use of underlining and highlighting of words and other elements (starting with the Q in our new logo), accompanied by a refreshing colour palette, which together mimicked the use of highlighters. By doing this, we ensure that what’s important, is never missed, and allowing our stakeholders to quickly grasp what’s important, helping them optimise their time and give them more time for other important tasks. We also selected a typography that moved us away from the neutrality and conservative nature of our sector. We also created a visual system where the design elements and assets we created were displayed in innovative, modern ways, based on the idea of a different, more graphic way of communicating information. This was inspired by one of our other brand benefits, which is our ability to filter, prioritise and interpret different types information and communicate them in a clear, concise way to our stakeholders.
Looking to the future
In sum, we feel that we’ve finally elevated Qualifyze from a promising, diligent startup with an innovative business model, to a mature, modern and innovative company in the Pharma space with an extremely bright future. With this new, unique branding approach that “puts a face and a voice” to the future of auditing and supply chains, we finally feel like we’ve grown up into the kind of company we’ve always been behind closed doors. We hope you enjoy the new face of Qualifyze, and it brings a little bit of brightness to your auditing processes.