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Case study: Project Family

Addressing the key overlooked areas impacting families

Published: 13 Jan 2020

Client: Ferring Pharmaceuticals

Agency: 90TEN with project specific support from Chandler Chicco Agency, a Syneos Health company

Campaign: Project Family

Timescale: N/A

A quick look

Ferring has spent decades tackling unmet needs to help people around the world build families and live better lives. In 2018 the company decided the time had come to step up its communications and proactively tell the remarkable stories of the work it does.

Ferring aimed to address three key areas that profoundly impact families but are often overlooked: fertility, premature birth and safe birth. To do this, we created Project Family to shine a spotlight on the work Ferring does to support families of all shapes and sizes with these challenges. Through highly targeted traditional and social media engagement, we reached 1.5 billion people around the world, doubled Ferring’s share of voice and improved the company’s reputation in the field by 40%.

Challenge

At the beginning of 2018, Ferring was a company with a lot to say but a very quiet voice. As a family-owned pharma company with no investors, Ferring had no obligation to communicate externally and its presence was limited compared to other companies of the same size. Although many great initiatives were underway within the company to help people everywhere to build families, awareness of them externally was low outside the company.

When faced with an exciting period of game-changing initiatives and collaborations in fertility, premature birth and safe birth, Ferring needed to transform its approach to communications to support its wider business objectives. The aim was to raise the profile of Ferring with healthcare professionals and potential partners. With building families at the company’s core, this also meant engaging with the parents of today and tomorrow.

Solution

Our approach was to bring together all of Ferring’s activities under one identity and voice to demonstrate the extent of the life-enhancing and life-saving work the company does from conception to birth. In spite of persistent myths, fertility is not just a women’s issue. While premature birth and birth complications can have a profound impact on entire families, our research revealed that these issues are often discussed as impacting women alone, leaving the effect on men and the broader family out of the picture. As a family-owned company, we identified an opportunity for Ferring to bring families to the forefront of these important topics.

To do this we created Project Family – a worldwide conversation to engage with the media and directly with our audiences. Project Family was used to launch Ferring’s new social channels and it was through this that we brought together all the remarkable stories of the work that Ferring does with families of all shapes and sizes. Highlights included:

Safe birth: Making the publication of the findings of the CHAMPION study, an initiative that Ferring has worked on with the World Health Organization and others, a truly global news event. The study showed the effect Ferring’s treatment has had on preventing post- partum haemorrhage – the world’s leading cause of maternal death. Communications included sending a humanitarian photojournalist to Uganda, Nepal and India to capture photography on the ground, live reportage from an Indian hospital to show the urgencyof the situation as well as holding a joint press conference with the WHO
Fertility: Bringing together fertility influencers from across Europe, including same-sex couples and
others from the ‘Trying to Conceive’ community, to gain insight into the personal challenges they face. This highlighted a need for increased public education about the prevalence and emotional impact of fertility issues, and is driving the development of an upcoming awareness campaign
Prematurity: Collaborating to raise awareness of Ferring’s prematurity research and supporting the opening of the groundbreaking March of Dimes prematurity research centre in London.

Results

Project Family successfully created a global conversation, with a 235% increase in fertility, premature birth and safe birth conversations in the media and online over the course of 2018. During the year, we reached 1.5 billion people worldwide, doubled Ferring’s share of voice versus competitors (from 13% to 29%) and increased the company’s social media followers by 62%. Importantly, we increased Ferring’s reputation among healthcare professionals in safe birth, fertility and prematurity by 40%.

Client verdict

“Our new approach to external communications has well and truly put Ferring on everyone’s radar. We are now not only being recognised as leaders in reproductive medicine and women’s health, but our bold approach to external communications has got people talking about these very important topics and their impact on building families.” Bhavin Vaid, Head of Corporate Communications and Public Affairs, Ferring Pharmaceuticals