In the same week, an implant company publishes three things. Medical Education announces a cadaver lab with operating room photos, a black background, and an academic tone. Product uploads the product page for a new system, with renders on white and a table of codes. Customer Service sends distributors an email with dispatch hours, in a different typeface. All three pieces are well made. Side by side, they look like they come from three different companies.
This keeps happening in the industry for a concrete reason: each team speaks to a different audience and knows it better than anyone. Surgeons expect rigor from training, surgical technologists want the exact code, distributors need to know when the order will arrive. When each team handles its piece with its own judgment, it gets it right for its audience, and the company loses its voice.
What a communication territory is
A territory is an area of communication with its own topic, audience, and tone, within a shared identity. It isn't a sub-brand or a department. Medical education can be one territory; product, another; customer service and logistics, another. Each one defines what's talked about there, to whom, in what register, and with what graphic variation.
What territories solve is a production problem. Without them, every new piece reopens the same discussion: what tone to use, what color, whether this photo works or not. With them, a piece starts out knowing where it speaks from, and the designer or outside vendor has a written answer.
Where they come from
Territories are built from what the company already communicates, rather than from a textbook template. The starting point is the list of topics the company publishes about or wants to publish about: education, product, service, events, the relationship with physicians, sometimes the relationship with patients. Then the ones that overlap are merged and named.
That step brings up decisions that belong to each company. Leadership may not want to highlight some topics, and they're still worth keeping. A manufacturing plant, for example, may not be the main message and still have a place within a territory about innovation and growth, along with product testing, new facilities, and the distributors who come on board.
What's shared and what changes
Unity is decided first. There are things all territories share:
- the brand palette, even if each territory has a lead color;
- the typefaces, with different weights depending on the territory;
- the same photographic treatment;
- a base tone, with small variations.
The test is simple: a standalone piece from any territory, seen without context, has to read as coming from the company. If it takes seeing the logo to recognize it, the difference between territories has gone too far.
The resulting document has to say where each one is used. A palette per territory is of little use if nobody knows which territory a course post, a product page, or an email to distributors belongs to. The application areas, with examples of the company's real pieces, are what make it usable.
The SAI example
SAI, an Argentine orthopedic manufacturer and distributor, already had a brand with a concept in use, Better Together. Its communication came from different fronts, and it lacked a structure that would let each one speak in its own tone without losing that concept.
The work started from seven pillars the company was already communicating and arrived at five territories, named in English for a company that sells outside the country: Education & Knowledge, Products & Solutions, Innovation & Growth, Customer Experience & Support, and Community & Engagement. The manufacturing side, which the client didn't want to put front and center, went into Innovation & Growth along with infrastructure, product testing, and new partners. Each territory has a lead color on the shared palette and its own graphic variation.
The sequence had consequences on the website. When the product pages and sections were written, it had already been decided which territory each one spoke from, and the same went for the messages on each channel: website, newsletter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. How the brand work was done is in the case study Narrative and communication territories.
When territories are needed
A company with a single product and a single audience can do without territories. They become necessary when several teams publish, when there's medical education in addition to the catalog, when an outside vendor produces pieces, or when the company opens a market and a subsidiary with its own voice appears. At that point, every piece that goes out without an assigned territory is a piece someone will have to fix.
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