Rebranding to recruit

from Nature Reviews Drug Discovery

Simon Frantz

Simon Frantz, Associate Editor (News), Nature Reviews Drug Discovery
email: s.frantz@nature.com

The successful rebranding of some areas of science could tempt others to do the same to boost flagging recruitment levels. If only it were so simple.

Madonna, FedEx and GlaxoSmithKline: they all have one thing in common — rebranding has played a key part in their success. Whether it is for creative purposes, market segregation, or after merger and acquisition activity, reinvention and redesign is increasingly becoming a standard strategy for boosting interest in, and therefore success of, a company.

It is not a phenomenon that has escaped science. Intentionally or not, some of the most exciting areas of research at present have had relatively less glamorous, but no less accurate, monikers. But replace these with a buzzword that trips off the tongue and oozes dynamism, and, hey presto, funding increases, academic departments sprout up, and a new generation of students enter with renewed interest, many hoping for careers in the current field du jour.

One of the biggest areas of interest in biomedical science exploded in such a manner. The 1990s witnessed a prolific output of data on DNA, RNA and proteins from genome sequencing projects and projects thereafter. With this data in hand, researchers now had the potential to understand all the relationships of all types of biological information with respect to one another in a cell, tissue and even an organism. The integration of all this information, otherwise known as systems biology, grew from pioneers such as Leroy Hood at the Institute of Systems Biology — although the definition of systems biology has become increasingly nebulous, now tending to mean an understanding of the biological menagerie found in a whole system.

But studying systems as a whole is no post-genomic subject. As any scientist of a certain age will no doubt tell you, researchers have been working on the study of system function, although at a different level, for centuries — they just called it physiology. However, this hasn't stopped scores of departments and companies adopting the systems biology brand, all recruiting systems biologists to the task of dissecting biological pathways that might be important in disease.

Another hot area of research is nanotechnology. Since Gimzewski, Rohrer and Binnig of the IBM Research Laboratory in Zurich invented the scanning tunnelling microscope in 1981, scientists have been able to explore the world of atoms and molecules at the nanometre level. After this, the development of devices of a miniscule size has blossomed, arguments about the disruptive nature of 'nanobots' have filled the pages of magazines and newspapers, and governments have published official reports on its potential use and abuse.

Yet materials scientists, physicists, chemists and biologists have long been working at the nanoscale level. For ages, all were toiling in separate laboratories unaware that their work related to one of the hottest areas in science. It's still too early to say whether nanotechnology will be successfully applied to drug discovery, but there is certainly the possibility that it could help in areas such as the delivery of drugs and nucleic acids, imaging and biosensors. At the moment, however, the mere mention of nanotechnology seems to almost guarantee that scientists will attract funders and entrepreneurs to finance start-up companies.

So is rebranding a sure-fire way of invigorating traditional subjects, and providing them with a means to kick-start the recruitment of researchers that are choosing a more 'glamorous' path? It is tempting to think that areas of drug discovery and development, such as in vivo pharmacology, which continues to see a downturn of interest in both industry and graduate recruitment for many reasons¹, could perhaps rebrand itself, sit back and watch the scientists return in droves.

If only it were so simple. For every rebranding success story, there are crashing failures. In the United Kingdom, failures include British Steel's change to Corus and the nuclear reactor Windscale attempting to leave behind its accident-prone past by changing its name to Sellafield.

But most notable was the decision to rebrand the Post Office as Consignia in 2002. Here was a lesson in cultural destruction. The Post Office was founded in 1635, after an English Royal Proclamation "for the settling of the Letter-Office of England and Scotland" was issued, which decreed that the Royal Posts are open to the public. Changing such a familiar name that to many conjures up images of red pillar boxes and whistling postmen created confusion and anger in the public's mind, and Consignia eventually reverted back to its original name. If a brand has existed for decades, if not centuries, the idea that it must be valuable, successful, worthy or profitable carries great value. The fact is that rebranding can't act as a band-aid for problems, and changing names can result in loss of identity — an undoing of the brand. Rebranding for the sole purposes of raising stock value is therefore more likely to fail than succeed.

So, by-and-large science shouldn't succumb to the temptation of undergoing a rebranding exercise as a quick-fix solution to help recruitment. Scientists have traditionally been a good filter for this — less-than-popular terms coined in journal articles are usually restricted to just those pages. But in the age of '-omics' and other such buzzwords, the desire to create such a phrase for one's own subject is greater than ever. Even branded areas are being affected by branding. Systems biology enjoys a liberal life nowadays, with people using it in many different ways. Others are creating variations on the systems biology name to describe their own research, which individually probably makes for a clearer definition of their own work, but en masse creates confusion to the outsider. Having too many names will always cause problems. Just ask Prince.

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