Bio-Engineering the Future:
How Branding Drives Growth for Synbio Ventures
Bio-Engineering the Future
05.07.24
Synthetic biology’s emergent ability to rewrite the code of life—and, by extension, the structure of the material world around us—is about re-engineering our future.
At Landscape, we create future-forward brands that help new ventures shift perspectives, set expectations, and gain the early, essential trust and traction to lead their category.
Synthetic biology, as an emergent category, is starting to yield new possibilities and transformative results across a wide variety of applications, from medicine and chemicals to energy, agriculture, and our food system.
But as with any nascent category, Synbio companies and the category at large face several significant barriers that need to be overcome to establish awareness and scale adoption to bring benefits to the wider world.
Strategic branding can play a critical tool in achieving this.
New Synbio ventures are emerging daily, much like well-fed microbes in a petri dish, making standout critical amidst an increasingly competitive category.
In a venture’s early stages, it can be an all too easy trap to do what’s minimally needed: Basic marketing based on basic branding that mimics prevalent category tropes, from generic, scientific-sounding names through to trust-inspiring colors (blue), supported by complex technical visualizations and potentially, some people in lab coats.
Your brand can't afford to be lost in a primordial soup of sameness, especially when it counts most, your early stage of awareness generation. It’s essential to engineer your brand for maximum standout, from a memorable name and visually distinct identity to a compelling narrative articulating what’s advantaged about your position, product, process, and people.
The best brands in this category drive standout and awareness by making invisible science visible, balancing technical precision with human ingenuity, and connecting their theoretical future impact to a tangible opportunity that’s available today.
Being thoughtful early on about shaping a distinct and highly memorable brand pays off when you stand apart in your category, are remembered by critical audiences, and score commercial wins.
Ginkgo Bioworks, offering a platform for cell programming, stands out by communicating its novel capabilities through unconventional storytelling and bold visual identity, which includes a distinctive name and position as “The Organism Company.”
Solugen, building a molecule factory for bio-based chemicals, creatively visualizes engineering zero-carbon materials in their BioForge™. The brand has a strong identity, an ambitious but true promise (Planet-scale change starts here), a human voice and perspective, and an engaging digital experience that pushes beyond category conventions.
While many Synbio companies target business customers rather than consumers, building broader relevance and trust beyond the niche of early adopters is optional.
They demystify complex capabilities, dimensionalize impact potential, and demonstrate transparency in their process and purpose of innovation, thereby turning indifference and skepticism into interest and trust.
These are critically important for this emergent category, which is still very much shaped by government regulations and policy incentives.
Pivot Bio, which offers bio-based crop nutrition technologies, leads with clear value propositions, demonstrates measurable economic and environmental advantages, and engages audiences with content marketing and initiatives that stimulate the adoption of its solution.
Upside Foods, growing sustainable cell-cultured meats, builds trust by showcasing a tangible product, “translating” the science of cell-cultivation into easy-to-digest education, and bringing to life the positive impact cultivated meat can offer globally.
Kiverdi, focused on CO2 transformation into bio-based products, invites engagement via provocative “What Ifs” paired with straightforward brand storytelling and illustrations to connect technological potential to practical, commercial solutions.
By nature, Synbio ventures are about creating new micro-scale properties, processes, or platforms that can become ingredients to the macro-scale re-invention of industries. The same innovation may yield valuable applications across diverse sectors such as healthcare, food production, cosmetics, and agriculture.
However, getting traction across multiple customer segments can be challenging for a new brand with limited marketing funding.
This is why Synbio pioneers should consider branded partnerships or ingredient branding. Both can be cost-effective strategies for amplifying brand awareness and increasing their innovation's perceived value to the market.
In negotiations with customers about pilots, trial runs, joint research, or shared development initiatives, Synbio leaders should ensure that co-branding is included in any contractual agreements. Well-communicated innovation partnerships with brands that are established leaders in their respective categories have multiplier signal value. Even if these are limited partnerships focused on jointly exploring opportunities, their signal can amplify your perceived stature and create peer pressure for other customers to partner with you.
A similar and more targeted option is to explore an ingredient branding strategy. This enables early-stage ventures to drive disproportionate brand awareness and positive equity when their innovation (and brand) are leveraged as ingredients to the capabilities of more prominent, well-established brands. In that case, Synbio ventures focused on multi-use applications or proprietary process platforms should establish a portfolio of trademarked ingredient brands that are carefully managed across customer use cases to increase brand equity.
Checkerspot, pioneering microalgae-oil-based performance materials, highlights multiple collaborations with product innovators around its’ Wing™ platform, a molecular foundry.
Modern Meadow, focused on bio-fabricated leather alternatives, features commercial partnerships centered around its Bio-FREED™ textile dyeing process based on Bio-Alloy™, a system for combining proteins with biobased polymers.
Synbio will not just reshape the surface of the world around us. It will go deeper by re-coding the script of life and the structure of the material world around us.
Similarly, branding isn't just about the surface value of picking a name and logo for your venture; it's about engineering perception dynamics in your favor to surface a powerful brand that drives standout, builds trust, and generates scalable momentum from day one.
The best ventures optimize their brand narrative to take down existing perception barriers and signal their commercial value and advantaged position with undeniable credibility as either the first, best or only in the rapidly expanding world of Synbio.
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Frank H Vial is the Director of Strategy at Landscape, a boutique brand strategy and design studio shaping structure and surface in service of social good.