Science Market Update

Are you looking for a little more attention for your lab products?  Strong visual aids and great graphics can dramatically impact the outcome while exhibiting at an event.  The image below is from one of our Biotechnology Vendor Showcase™ events, presents a great example of how using strong visuals can draw researchers to an exhibit space.  Notice the eyes on the poster are positioned at approximate eye level to the viewer.  In addition to this, the company builds on the trust theme with the over-head title.  Knowing your audience always helps.  Take a moment to think about  who might stop to look twice at a young child's face... What would make your target audience stop in their tracks?

For those of you who don't know us well, we are a small family owned business with a drive to help those in the research industry get ahead. Like other small family owed businesses, our resources are often more limited than our vision, and like other entrepreneuriall businesses,  that doesn't stop us from trying to make things work better, faster, and easier whenever we can.  In this business, technology is our friend. 

"Marketing" is probably not a word that's used much in university chemistry labs; likewise, lab reagent and equipment suppliers may not consider it a key part of their job to actively promote lab safety practices.  But what if marketing lab equipment safety, with all of the flash and attention-holding gimmicks in the sales and advertising arsenal is exactly what is needed to keep (often young) lab workers safe?  And who knows more about marketing: business or academia? 

A recent article in Inside Science on the challenge of insuring a safe laboratory experience for students and researchers addressed the specific issue of the lack of data showing the best lab safety practices.  To meet this gap in knowledge about not only how to be safe but to teach and monitor safety in the lab, UCLA launched the UC Center for Laboratory Safety, which is the first of its kind in the nation to study lab safety and develop optimal lab practices.  Essentially, what they do is:

Once upon a time realizing university officials really wanted to know where students were congregating and what they were doing together had an ominous ring, but that's all changed in the super-connected, GPS-tracked world of today's social media.  Internet connectivity no longer means checking in from the vague no-man's-land of cyberspace: with the smartphones almost everyone now has (at least the Gen Y set), you are constantly locatable in real space through the geo-locator technology built into your phone.  This geo-social component of social networking offers new possibilities for interacting with places as well as people, and leaving a market-opportunity-rich breadcrumb trail while you're at it.  

Student affairs personnel at universities across the United States have already begun to utilize the new tool available to them through companies like FourSquare.  Others who haven't jumped on the bandwagon are analyzing the numbers to see if geo-social connectivity is worth the investment of man hours to set up and administer it.  To assist schools in making this decision, the Education Advisory Board has put out a useful Student Affairs Technology Update report on using FourSquare specifically.  The following chart from the report shows how various campuses are already using geo-social media and to what ends:

PatientsLikeMe is an online networking and data-sharing resource for people suffering from chronic illnesses who want to talk about the effectiveness of treatments and medications.  It is not a chat group or a non-profit but a business run by MIT engineers that offers a service to patients and science alike by selling data it collects from subscribers to interested biomedical entities.  Two recent announcements by the company make it clear they have jumped up an order of importance in what they do and have demonstrated a use for social media that is potentially game-changing:

If your territory includes the Greater Los Angeles Area and you have products or services of interest to the life science research market, you can reach over 700 of the top thought leaders in academic science research at this week's upcoming vendor fair.  Researchers actively seeking solutions to their research challenges will be attending this event.

In 2010, this vendor show on campus at the University of Pennsylvania attracted over 500 academic researchers. 

The University of Wisconsin at Madison is a research powerhouse that also knows how to turn its R into D, bringing technology to market, jobs to Wisconsin, and steady income back to the university through licensing agreements.

Finding quality sales leads a hair raising experience? Life science trade shows may be the answer!

Any science supply company can purchase a booth or tabletop display at a national or boutique science related trade show, send a sales rep and some literature, and if the  product is good  they will likely get leads. The best leads --the most eager, most relevant and most urgent leads-- usually convert to sales.  The best sales reps get more leads, follow up on them faster, and communicate the company's value proposition better, converting more of them to sales than their less competent counterparts.