LightLab

Challenge

LightLab Imaging was a Japanese-owned company that had developed the world’s first intervascular imaging system that used a technology called Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT).  There was little or no awareness of OCT at the time, nor of LightLab or its product, the C7.

Diagnostics

We executed an extensive discovery process that included interviews with cardiologists, clinical advisors and company representatives. Our team conducted secondary research on the market and the competition. We found that every major competitor was still creating their image using ultrasound, which resulted in soft, gray images that are difficult to interpret, whereas the OCT images created by LightLab’s C7 were very high-resolution images with a golden tone to them that made them very distinct. In fact, it was one of the company’s software engineers who said, “We see our images in other presentations and we know they are our images because there is nothing else like it in the world. We also found that the focus of nearly all imaging equipment manufacturers centered heavily on the hardware, and on a deep-dive discussion of the difference between the various technologies. What we learned from our interviews with cardiologists was that they didn’t care about any of that. They just wanted to see clearly what is going on inside the blood vessels.”

Strategy

“It’s about the image!” These five words formed the foundation of everything we did for LightLab. Communications needed to be less about the debate over which technology is best, or which hardware is best looking, and focus almost exclusively on what really mattered, the quality of the image that is generated by the equipment.

Solutions

• We coined a term EXTREME RESOLUTION to communicate how far ahead LightLab was in this regard.
• We modified the C7 name by adding XR (C7-XR) for Extreme Resolution
• We named the image and trademarked it as “The Golden Image”
• We featured their intravascular images prominently in all of their marketing promotions
• We developed the tagline “The brightest ideas in intravascular imaging”

Results

The success of our brand strategy for the LightLab C7-XR played a key role in the acquisition of LightLab Imaging by St. Jude Medical, which continues to sell the product.