J&J MedTech / Growing a Category

Role
Brand Strategy, Creative Direction

Agency
J&J Design

Client
J&J MedTech

5 years ago, J&J MedTech faced a challenge.

Their competitors had beaten them to market in the rapidly expanding arena of digital surgery. Just how rapidly expanding? In 2019 the total value of the digital surgery technologies market was $252 million and growing at a rate of 32% a year.

That’s a $5.1 billion market by 2030.

J&J MedTech needed to catch up. They had to quickly advance their own projects in R&D out of the lab and get to market.

But how do you decide which projects to green-light?

At J&J Design, Johnson & Johnson’s in-house design agency, I leveraged my experience in entertainment and advertising to imagine how these cutting-edge technologies could change people’s lives for the better.

Over several defining years, my team and I were charged with imagining how various medical device ecosystems would work in the future.

Technology, creative and production needed to work together seamlessly to make these stories connect on a human level. So that the senior leadership could see beyond the data to how and why the devices were so transformative.

One project that proved pivotal: creating a vision for connected trauma surgery — 10 years in the future.

This complex web of dozens of technologies and ecosystems needed to be explained in just a few minutes. Most crucially, the audience of senior leaders needed to actually understand the vision.

There was no way the viewer would have time to process all this information. I suggested a solution: show the story of a patient having a traumatic accident as if it were a trailer for an exciting film. We would move through the care journey showing just the highlights, the best moments of these technologies working. They loved the idea.

Most importantly, it worked: because of the clearly articulated story and message, the senior leaders understood the business unit’s vision, and the ROI became undeniable.

Once they heard the stories, they got it.

Several initiatives were green-lit and fast-tracked, forming the backbone of today’s J&J Medtech Orthopedic Surgery business.

Today, J&J MedTech is a leader in 11 categories of digital surgery with sales of more than $1B annually, with 50% year-over-year growth in 2023 alone.