Pulse Branding

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

Vivo BioInnovator is the investment division of Viva Biotech Ltd. I work as an alliance manager, reaching out to potential community partners to find new investments and coordinate resources to help our existing portfolio companies. Our headquarters are based in Shanghai, but we also have operations between Boston and San Diego.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Pulse Branding?

We had a lot of issues with our prior website because it was poorly designed and confusing. In my role, I was constantly faced with questions from people who had visited our website and left even more confused than they were before. The website looked like it had been designed 20 years ago. 

With our prior website, we got so many questions from universities, investors, incubators, and founders that we communicated with. Everybody was completely confused about our company’s purpose, objectives, and operations. Half of our website was contradicting the other.

Our portfolio was one of the most critical aspects of this website redesign. We wanted to be able to highlight the different areas of our portfolio via a key function that could sort our companies by the different diseases they’re working on, the types of drugs they’re developing, or the company’s location. We also needed to be able to easily update our news page, and the website needed to have English and Chinese language functions.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Pulse Branding had us fill out a comprehensive survey in advance to ask us about the intended look and feel for the website, the key messages that we wanted to convey, the target audience, and overall goals for what we wanted our users to do. With the survey completed, they helped us create a design that met all of the metrics that we’d outlined and took all of our audiences into consideration.

Pulse Branding designed our new website using Webflow. They created color schemes and sourced videos, visuals, and fonts. 

They designed most of the site from scratch — they may have been able to pull some old written content and files from the previous website, but a lot of it had to be redone.

What is the team composition?

My main point of contact was the project manager, and I believe she had a team of about four people.

How did you come to work with Pulse Branding?

I knew my main point of contact at Pulse Branding through a volunteer club. I reached out to different people through the volunteer club about our project. I saw some of the past work that my contact at Pulse Branding had done, and it looked great. I put together a proposal with three different designers from our city, and my colleagues chose Pulse Branding’s design as their favorite.

How much have you invested with them?

We invested $10,000–$15,000 with Pulse Branding. That’s not their normal rate — I think they gave me a discount because the referral came through the volunteer group. 

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked with Pulse Branding from June 2021–September 2021. The whole process took about three months in total, including multiple rounds of revision and review.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement? 

I would estimate that the number of investment referrals that we receive through our website has doubled since we launched Pulse Branding’s redesign.

The difference between the phone calls I’ve received from our website users before and after the new website launched has been like night and day. Since Pulse Branding redesigned our website, I’ve received zero questions from our contacts about our workflow or our model. I’ve gotten countless compliments on the overall design of the website. We’ve had much more positive response rates. It’s made my life 10 times easier because I’m not trying to clear up the confusion that our old website was causing with our contacts.

Pulse Branding provided fantastic advice throughout the process for making sure that the website was functional for all of the different partners and audiences that we were working with. 

I think one of my favorite features on the new website is a section where we talk about our parallel objectives and what our company does. Pulse Branding was able to make a layout with flip cards that made so much sense in that context. 

Pulse Branding found fantastic videos and visuals for the website overall. They spent so much time going through and finding these really fantastic visuals for all the website headers. Those headers really helped create the overall look and feel of the website. 

They were able to create the critical portfolio sorting function that we had requested. They also did a great job of highlighting the two parallel lines of work that we do within the investment unit. They created a UI that really made it easier to understand our company and our work.

They were wonderful about going through and helping with some of the grammatical edits, ensuring that both the English and Chinese versions of the website had the same meaning and intent. They pointed out major misspellings and typos, but they were clear in communicating that their scope did not include copywriting services. 

After the redesign, our workflows improved. Pulse Branding made it easy for me to add news articles, and to adjust and filter which articles our home page features. Knowing that I’m not tech-savvy, they built the site using Webflow because its interface is easier to access and use, without requiring me to do any kind of coding.

How did Pulse Branding perform from a project management standpoint?

Their communication was fantastic throughout. It was very easy working with Pulse Branding because they had a great way of really clarifying expectations before any work was done. They were very flexible on how to meet our requirements.

They were very determined to meet some of our deadlines in particular, and sometimes our team actually needed a little bit longer to make decisions. They were patient with me as I ran the design through various levels of approvals and permissions within our company. 

They gave a lot of good feedback and suggestions, and they were always receptive to the feedback that we gave them. Whenever I explained why I didn’t like something that they had created, they were able to find solutions. We communicated via phone call and WeChat.

They’ve been incredibly helpful with my questions after the engagement ended — they’re more than happy to jump on a quick call to walk me through whatever I need to do.

What did you find most impressive about them?

All of the aspects of this project that Pulse Branding worked on were really fantastic. They’ve exceeded our expectations. They were not only very creative with their output, but also very patient as I worked through various levels of my team.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Be very clear upfront with what you want. Once those expectations are in line, Pulse Branding will go out of their way to make sure your requirements are met. If there’s something you don’t like, be very clear about why you don’t like it.