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Award Winning Healthcare Brand Development Experts Launch Novel Business To Build and Fiercely Protect Brand Identities

Guard Dog Brand Development^®, LLC opens its doors in NYC

NEW YORK - November 2007 - Award winning healthcare brand development experts Camille DeSantis and Maria Casini are excited to announce this month the launch of Guard DogBrand Development, LLC (GDBD), a novel brand development company focusing exclusively on the healthcare sector, including biopharma/biotech companies, health systems/hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and their products and innovations. GDBD blends strategy, design, and long-term commitment to make all communications channels consistent, cohesive, and relevant, thus ensuring the relationship between their clients' key stakeholders and their clients' brands are loyal and sustainable.

GDBD has a unique position, being the first independent brand development agency to adopt a silo-busting approach to brand identity. By maintaining complete brand objectivity and utilizing their proprietary and proven process, GDBD is able to efficiently and effectively create brand identities, positioning and message platforms that will resonate across every communication channel, thereby increasing the value of their client's medical education, public relations, and advertising efforts. This is critical as being off-message to a stakeholder group can be seriously detrimental to a brand.

"Brand identities, whether corporate, product, or science, need to resonate and balance both the functional and emotional assets of the brand," said Camille DeSantis, BS, MT (ASCP), Co-President and Managing Partner, Brand Strategy and Client Service of GDBD. "With today's key stakeholder audiences of a brand being numerous and diverse, it is imperative for our client's identities and core messages to be relevant, consistent and cohesive across all disciplines." "When a brand's identity and message platform is approached in silos, you run the risk of being off message," said DeSantis. "Eliminating silos in the brand development process will foster consistent communication and ultimately be more cost effective for our clients."

GDBD's services include strategic brand positioning, message platform development, brand brief development (which becomes the platform), strategic brand design of the "look and feel" and key elements such as the brandmark, or logo, visual system guidelines, implementation, monitoring, and ongoing strategic guidance.

"Many people may not fully understand the distinction between brand development and branding", said Maria Casini, Co-President and Managing Partner, Strategic Brand Design of GDBD. "Brand development is the creation of a brand strategy and identity, both verbal and visual, and branding is the application of that brand identity across various mediums. The work GDBD does is more than just creating a logo or color palette; there is a strategy to developing a visual language for a brand and that strategy works hand in hand with the overall brand identity strategy."