Product superiority campaign: SLActive vs Competition

Nobel Biocare's TiUltra launch reframed the competitive conversation — claiming hydrophilic parity with SLActive and superior osseointegration, backed by its own published studies. Momentum built for a year. Younger customers started asking questions. SLActive — the market's most expensive implant — was losing share of mind.

Recognised that Nobel adopting an SLActive-like surface was a tell of weakness, not parity — and that reactive competitive guidance wasn't enough to reverse the momentum. Designed an unprecedented head-to-head pre-clinical study: microCT-scanned a TiUltra implant and CAD/CAM-milled an identical geometry in Roxolid material with SLActive surface — removing implant design as a variable so that comparison was scientifically defensible. Built a multichannel campaign around the result — animation, social reels, congress tower-screens with QR codes, posters, banners — engineered to make a dry pre-clinical finding visually unmissable before a single word was read.

Published in top-tier Clinical Oral Implants Research, timed 10 days before EAO 2022. Landing page traffic hit an all-time high for Straumann. Local markets rolled it out as breaking news, market surveys showed SLActive top of mind among implantologists, and the perceived brand value KPI doubled 4 months post-launch. The study's lead author received Wiley's "Top Downloaded Article of the Year" award the following year — out of roughly 200,000–300,000 articles Wiley published that year.