Most biotech teams like to say they’re “unique”. The science might be. But your brand is never experienced in isolation.
An investor looks at you with a browser full of open tabs. A potential partner scrolls through three or four similar companies in one sitting. A candidate compares your site and your deck with others before deciding if you’re serious. In that context, your brand is always part of a line-up, not a solo performance.
Ignoring competitors doesn’t make you original. Copying them doesn’t make you credible either. The real work is to understand the landscape you’re entering and then decide, very intentionally, where you want to sit inside it.
1. The two unhelpful extremes
I usually meet two attitudes.
The first is the blinders approach: “We don’t really have competitors.” The reasoning is that no one does exactly the same combination of platform, modality, indication and data. That may be true scientifically, but in people’s heads you still sit next to “other AI for X”, “other microbiome platforms”, “other tools that promise faster and cheaper discovery.” You’re competing for attention, trust and budget, whether you acknowledge it or not.
The second is the copy-paste approach: “Let’s look like the successful ones.” Someone opens a famous company’s website and says, “This feels premium, can we do something like this?” You end up borrowing their gradients, their color palette, their typography – and slowly become another anonymous member of the category wallpaper.
The healthy place is in between: study the field carefully, then choose what to echo and what to avoid.
2. Build a small, intentional comparison set
You don’t need fifty examples. Eight to twelve is enough if you pick them carefully.
Start with your direct peers – companies tackling a similar problem or selling to the same buyer. Add a few adjacent players who might not look like direct competitors but still compete for the same money or mental space: CROs, enabling tools, platforms your buyers are considering instead. Then add two or three reference brands you admire, even if they’re outside biotech, because they handle clarity or storytelling in a way that resonates.
This little set is what you’re going to analyse – not to judge who’s “prettiest,” but to see what your audience is already trained to expect.
3. Audit them like a designer, not like a fan
Open each brand and look with a cool, analytical eye.
How does the logo and name behave? Is it purely typographic or does it use a symbol? Does it whisper “infrastructure”, shout “disruption”, or lean into something softer and more human?
What about color? Many fields settle into a comfort zone: all-blue, all-teal, or all-neon. Ask yourself what that palette communicates – clinical calm, tech energy, sustainability, luxury – and whether you want to sit inside that comfort zone or slightly to the edge of it.
Pay attention to typography. Is everything in clean, neutral sans-serifs, or do some players push into more editorial or technical styles? Type tells you a lot about whether a company wants to feel like “serious pharma”, “nimble startup” or “research lab”.
Finally, notice imagery and language. Are you seeing real people and labs, or only abstract 3D forms and data glows? Do they lead the story with platform, with pipeline, with problem, or with impact?
You’re not copying any of this. You’re simply building a mental map of the category codes: the visual and verbal cues that say “this is one of those companies”.
4. Sketch the landscape
Once you’ve looked at a dozen brands this way, patterns start to emerge. I often draw a very simple map on paper:
along one axis, something like Academic ↔ Commercial,
along the other, Clinical ↔ Tech-y, or Understated ↔ Expressive.
Then I roughly place each company where it feels right. It doesn’t need to be precise. The point is to see where the clusters are – for example, five brands that all use soft teal, geometric sans-serifs and abstract blobs – and where there might be room to breathe.
This picture becomes a working tool: “The top-right corner is crowded with loud neons and gradients,” or “No one is occupying the calm, precise, slightly editorial space in the middle.” It’s easier to talk about direction when you can literally point at a quadrant of the map.
5. Decide which cues to keep – and where to zag
From there, you can start making deliberate choices.
Some category codes are worth respecting because they reassure people. If you’re working in serious clinical indications, you probably want a certain level of clarity, restraint and technical feel in your typography and layout. If you’re doing infrastructure-level work, you don’t want to look like a playful consumer app.
Other choices are completely open – and these are where your differentiation lives. Maybe everyone in your area uses cold blue and silver, and it actually fits you better to be slightly warmer and more human. Maybe competitors lean on generic 3D blobs, and you’d rather invest in textures and micrographs that genuinely relate to your modality. Maybe the whole field shouts in big, optimistic claims, and your strength is a quieter, more precise voice that feels closer to how scientists really speak.
The key question is not “How do we look different?” but “What difference feels honest for us?”
6. Turn that into practical design decisions
Once you know what you want to echo and what you want to avoid, design becomes much less subjective.
Color choices suddenly have context. You might still live in a cool palette for credibility, but choose a deeper, more architectural navy and a single, sharp accent instead of yet another teal gradient.
Typography stops being “which font do we like?” and becomes “we want to feel as rigorous as these players, but slightly more editorial than them.” That might mean pairing a calm sans-serif for body text with a more characterful typeface for headings.
Imagery decisions follow the same logic. Instead of defaulting to the lab stock photos everyone uses, you can decide to show more of the materials, data or environments that actually make your work distinct.
The goal isn’t to shock the category. It’s to be recognisable and memorable while still feeling like you belong in the room.
7. What this gives you beyond “looking good”
Spending time on this kind of competitor review might sound like a luxury, but it pays off in very practical ways.
Your creative brief to a designer or studio becomes sharper: “We want to feel as rigorous as company A, but less corporate than company B; we want to avoid the teal-blob look everyone is using.” It’s easier to get buy-in from the team because you can show why certain routes support the position you’ve chosen.
Most importantly, you stop designing in a vacuum. Every decision is made with an awareness of the real world your brand will live in: the messy browser full of tabs, the pitch deck carousel, the mental shelf where investors store “companies like this”.
Your biotech will always exist alongside others. You can either pretend that context doesn’t matter – or you can learn to read it, and then place yourself inside it with intent. That intent is what turns “nice visuals” into a brand that actually works.