GCI CASE STUDY

Business Strategy
Over six years, Genomics Collaborative Inc. (GCI) had quietly and painstakingly built its unique and vast Global Repository of over 500,000 human genetics samples. But several competitors had already achieved prominence in the genetics samples market. To win contracts with top pharmaceutical companies and to avoid price erosion caused by growing commoditization in the market, GCI needed to differentiate itself.

Positioning
Boston Communications embarked on an intensive positioning exercise using its PositionAudit methodology. We interviewed GCI’s management and technology leadership, its board of directors, industry press, and leading thinkers in human genetics at the Whitehead Institute. We analyzed the market positions and customer perceptions of GCI and its competitors.

Through this process, Boston Communications identified the key pain point of GCI’s customers, and articulated how GCI’s unique strengths made it best suited to ease that pain.

The pain point: Many drugs make it far along the billion-dollar development pipeline before human testing reveals problems. Pharmas are desperate for ways to cut the immense cost of testing new compounds.

Boston Communications helped GCI create a new category and establish itself as the category’s leader: “GCI is a drug target validation company.” GCI enables pharmaceutical makers to more quickly distinguish between promising compounds and dead-ends, letting them slash development costs and use resources more efficiently.

GCI’s unique strength: its Global Repository spans all three “silos” of human genetics samples – DNA, serum and tissue. Its competitors have collections in just one of the silos. For effective drug target validation, researchers need all three silos.

To avoid growing price competition over samples, we helped GCI emphasize another key point of differentiation: it offers not just samples but also science, with the medical doctors and top researchers who founded GCI working closely with the pharmas to streamline the development process, offering customized gene expression and candidate gene validation services.

Leveraging the PR Channel
Boston Communications helped GCI achieve coverage establishing its new positioning in top publications, including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Boston Globe (featured business story) and BioIT World (cover story).

Business Outcomes
GCI signed all the top pharmas as drug target validation customers. In June 2004, GCI was acquired by SeraCare Life Sciences Inc. (Nasdaq: SRLS), which was attracted by GCI’s differentiated market position and the complementary fit of GCI’s products and services.