You Can’t Say That: Connecting Compliance and Differentiated Brands

5 minute read

Words are in constant use, put under constant testing. But, as with anything that’s used constantly, they can be fallible. The words brands choose are no different - they need ongoing support, checks and maintenance to make sure they’re working well.

In the wellness sector, where regulation is both strict yet subjective, words need to stand strong. They are challenged to connect with the consumer without breaking laws of regulatory bodies: you cannot claim a food, supplement, or cosmetic can treat, cure, or prevent a disease.

When the words aren’t right, it’s not just time and energy in writing that’s wasted. Financial loss is felt in the short and long term, fines from regulatory bodies are compounded by the reputational costs of eroded consumer trust. We’ve seen implications of this across the industry and with clients who we’ve helped support through the next steps.

No matter how good the story is, non-compliant claims make businesses ill.

News Articles: Recent, high profile cases against wellness brands who made illegitimate claims.

The pendulum swing from positive storytelling to unsubstantiated medical claims can be unforgiving. Can’t say this. Can’t write that. Legal won’t green-light it. Compliance can often feel like the enemy to saying something interesting. Something different.

Brands who are leaps and bounds above the rest in the space don’t see regulatory constraint as a barrier of belligerence, but as a vehicle for more creative - and therefore differentiated - brand storytelling.

Calling Out an Industry

Information ill-health is ironically rife in wellness and surrounding beauty sector. When language strays too far from simple fact, a brand places itself at risk of being labelled a jargon junkie.

The Ordinary have made a name for themselves as the straight-talking beauty and skincare brand that describes science as science. Its newest provocation ‘The Periodic Fable’ plays on a recognised scientific chart to shine a light on pseudo-science-made-up-marketing spiel. It calls out the fictitious “empty promises to impossible standards and overhyped ingredients” that other players in the market peddle to consumers.

The Irony of It All

Health supplement brand Ritual made headlines (literally) by running a print ad in the NY Times with the headline “Buying a print ad is so ‘90s… and so are your supplement regulations.”. The target of their message being the current state of supplement regulations. By positioning themselves as being in the consumer’s corner, truly understanding contemporary attitudes and motivations, Ritual transparently communicates a brand that fulfils its promise “The future of health is clear”.

You and I, Not Us and Them

Building a compliant brand in the wellness industry means entering a landscape of friction. A brand team at one end, the compliance lead at the other. The marketing director in the middle, attempting to keep the peace and maintain consumer focus.

When this process is approached with a team mindset, it doesn’t have to feel like you’re walking over hot coals alone - you can build bridges together. Choosing a brand partner that values this shared challenge is vital.

Creativity Loves Constraints

Embodying the ‘creativity loves constraints’ aphorism - an embedded guiding principle in the tech industry - Unfound supported VJJ Health in female wellness through arduous regulation rounds. The brand messaging and packaging copy featured a casual yet never-timid tone which achieved strong differentiation in the market - leading to VJJ being featuring in design publications such as The Dieline and Creative Boom.

For collagen supplement brand Ingenious, Unfound delivered the cut-through necessary to not only tell a differentiated brand story, but also one that was regulatory good to go. Tapping into their ‘no-filler approach’ to products, they were able to clearly showcase their own standards of excellence beyond the predictability in their industry.

The Reality Check

Compliance may not be the first port of call in a brand concepting, but its role in building wider brand communications is unquestionable. Having a legal or compliance voice already in the room as early as possible, especially when structuring content pillars and marketing messages makes a huge difference. It helps to open up conversations of compliance with positivity, moving from “can’t say that.” towards “what about this?”.

Know Your ‘Why?’

Documenting and distributing a clear brand platform enables all stakeholders across marketing teams, brand teams and compliance teams to understand the positioning of the organisation and those it exists to serve. A strong overarching idea that’s articulated well will invigorate people to believe in your brand, from the inside out.

Live and Breathe

Producing collaborative, living messaging frameworks or ‘internal cheat sheets’ helps teams to use the right words. Centralising admin controls within these frameworks is a good idea so that changes can be monitored by both compliance and brand team leads. Supplying context with explicit implications helps teams to understand the decisions being made.

Beyond Product Benefits

Having a strong tone of voice enables your brand to have an opinion beyond unique product formulas. Your brand tone isn’t reserved for just taglines, it shows up across all comms, from packaging flyers to email flows. Brand language provides the opportunity to connect with consumers at an emotive or attitudinal level - not bombarding them with noisy of out-of-touch benefits.

Encouraging close working relationships with compliance, marketing and creative teams, whether internal or external, can help give a brand’s story the best shot at success. Figuring out what a wellness brand says is the core for trustworthiness and differentiation: compliance in all forms depends on it.

By embedding compliance within the creative process, brands can stop fighting against the rules and start using them in their favour. This collaborative shift means that constraints become a framework to find differentiation and market cut-through.

If you want to build better brand language and bridges with compliant storytelling, let’s get the foundations in place together. Chat to us - hello@unfound.studio.