Building a shared team identity with GenAI: a Case Study in breaking down silos across a rare disease marketing team
Generative AI can produce an image in seconds. Producing one that genuinely represents a person, earns their recognition and serves a purpose takes considerably longer. This case study describes how a global pharmaceutical company worked with SciencePOD on an internal campaign to build a shared identity for a rare disease marketing team, combining GenAI with traditional design craft. It also sets out what SciencePOD learned about applying these tools to real work.
The challenge
Cross-functional teams in pharma often operate in silos. Individual specialists can be highly capable within their own remit whilst lacking a shared sense of common purpose, particularly in rare disease, where teams are frequently small, dispersed and stretched across several markets. Distance and workload can make it harder still to build the everyday connections that hold a team together.
Our client wanted to address this directly. Their rare disease marketing team needed a way to recognise the distinct strengths of each member, connect those strengths to the company’s culture traits and principles, and turn a group of individuals into a unified and motivated team. The brief was as much cultural as it was creative. Every piece of content had to feel personal and authentic to the people it represented, rather than generic or imposed.
The solution and approach
SciencePOD proposed a personalised content programme built around a stylised animated character for each team member. The concept drew on a simple idea: ‘Give every individual a character identity whose strengths, or “powers”, map directly to the company’s cultural values and leadership principles’.
By tying each character back to a shared set of principles, the programme gave the team a common language as well as a set of images.
The process began with a series of remote interviews with team members. These sessions identified each person’s individual strengths and their alignment with the company’s values. This gave each team member first-hand experience in shaping their own character.
SciencePOD then translated these inputs into finished characters using a hybrid approach, testing several static and video GenAI tools alongside traditional design.
The programme produced four connected deliverables:
- A personalised animated character image for each team member
- An individual video interview with each member, introducing their character
- A group video animation bringing every character together into a single story
- A physical figurine of each character and team member
The group animation highlighted what each member contributed to the team through their special power, and it gave the team a shared visual statement of what they could achieve together. The figurines bridged the gap between digital and physical, turning a screen-based identity into something each person could keep on their desk for individual and team motivation.
The results
The outcomes of this project were as much about process as output. Working across multiple GenAI tools showed clearly where the technology performs well and where human judgement remains essential. The tools accelerated early visual exploration, but holding a character consistent across images and video, and keeping each one faithful to the brief and to the individual it represented, required steady human direction and repeated iteration from humans in the pipeline.
Two lessons stood out. First, the interview stage proved as valuable as the