At Six Degrees, we help clients discover the “white space” to position a product, company, or clinical trial brand for optimal uniqueness in the competitive field, thereby helping the brand realise its full potential. Identifying that open ground can be challenging, especially in crowded and competitive markets like clinical development in pharmaceuticals and biotechnology. We therefore employ several strategies and tactics to ensure that our competitive audit substantively informs our creative and implementation efforts.

One simple approach to understanding where the white space is in clinical trial branding is to quantify what the field is doing as a whole. We have covered the topic of trial name styles in a previous blog post and the propensity to use acronyms in the clinical trial space. Today, we want to look at characteristics of the trial names that are registered and to use that data to help identify underused characters and styles for new trial names.

Examining all the trials on the EU Clinical Trials Register across 12 European countries (9,200 in total), we extracted the 1,903 trials with names. After removing redundancies, we ended up with a dataset of 718 unique trial names. A first “cut” of the distribution of names by initial letter shows us that some letters are highly under-utilized compared to the rest.

Our analysis would suggest that initial letters such as “J”, “Q”, “U”, “W”, “Y” and “Z” offer a new trial name the best opportunity to stand out from the crowd. Those six letters have great potential from a creative standpoint and will give the resulting brand more of a competitive edge.

Another analysis charts the length of clinical trial names to identify where a new name may be able to compete more easily. Most clinical trial names consist of between 5 and 8 characters. However, the opportunity space offered by names 4 characters long and those that are between 9-12 characters in length may be worth exploring to help the trial name stand out.

Other interesting observations include the fact that only 23% of trial names are portrayed in sentence case rather than in all caps, only 23% of trial names include alphanumeric characters (including Arabic or Roman numerals) and only about half have a “real” word upfront.

The “physical” properties of trial names discussed here represent just one of several areas for differentiation we look at during the competitive audit phase of our trial branding process. To learn more about our integrated clinical trial branding and patient engagement services, please visit our website or contact us directly. Six Degrees stands ready to help you make your clinical trial more successful through better branding.