How Zeiss Microscopy Developed a Successful Mobile App for Marketing
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How Zeiss Microscopy Developed a Successful Mobile App for Marketing
Smartphone and mobile apps can be found in everyone’s pocket these days. I recently surveyed a number of life science companies about how they are using smartphone apps for marketing and sales. Among the companies I spoke to, each had a slightly different approach. A summary of that research, including benefits for both providers and customers, is posted on the ACP-LS blog.
If you’re thinking about developing a mobile application for smartphones or tablets as part of your life science marketing plan, you probably have a lot of questions about how to do it right. This podcast will provide the answers.
I spoke to Johannes Amon, a Global Online Marketing Specialist for Carl Zeiss Microscopy about the development of their first mobile app, Lab Light, and what made it successful.
Johannes was very generous in sharing his experience. We discussed:
Johannes’s considerations for choosing an app developer
Defining the functionality and the target audience – Should it be restricted to Zeiss users or could it be useful to all microscopists?
Integration of social sharing directly from within the app
How the Light Lab app promoted initially
The importance of understanding the level of effort required to maintain an app
Why microscopy is the easiest segment in life science marketing
Bonus: Need a first person movie review? Apparently Johannes’s colleagues refer to him as a walking iMDB. We may start another podcast just for that. Movie reviews for scientists, by scientists…
Links:
The Transcript
This transcript was lightly edited for clarity.
This episode starts abruptly as I just hit “record” on our planning call. We landed on a topic and went from there.
Chris: As soon as you said “app”, I'm thinking let's talk about that today, but we can save that one.
Johannes: I would actually be also really, really inclined to talk about apps particularly because this is actually the first thing I did when I came into this company to Zeiss Microscopy back in 2011. Jochen my boss back then was like 'Yes, well okay you still have some capacity, why not do an app?' And I was like, well, okay, I more or less just came from university. I'm a biologist by training, a microbiologist, and I was working for around one year in a pharmaceutical start up company which did market research but that got a bit boring soon, so I took the opportunity to go to Zeiss and then they came up in my first year with 'Well why don't you do an app?'
So I searched for an agency here in Munich where we still work with them, they are really quite amazing. And back then we did a fluorescence microscopy app. It's still available for iPhone and iPod. It's called Light Lab and this was our first app that we at Zeiss as a whole did, not only the Zeiss Microscopy. Since then we had some other app projects which of course also were end-user focused. All of those also involved imaging with the microscope. We can remotely control the confocals nowadays, we can access the imaging data from a server from virtually anywhere. I really need to send you the link where there is the overview of all of those apps and we have a kind of a two-part of an app it's Labscope and Matscope and with those you can do a digital classroom.
Chris: Nice, so we just continue talking about these apps. Do you want to tell me more about the Light Lab and what its intent was? Is it something that only a customer would use or is it something that you would use as a marketing tool?
Johannes: Actually we tried to do both when we can and if it makes sense also. So far the Light Lab we actually went in that direction full frontal. So we really looked at “Okay, what are the possibilities? Which social media channels, which communications channels from our side are we able to integrate into this app?” Because for one thing we did not want to have kind of, you know, it's free, of course it's a free app. We did not want to have some kind of annoying advertisement in there, like I don't know, when you have web pages with banners and with pop-ups and stuff like that. So we really tried to keep it a bit down.
You can very easily access the main functionality of the app, which really is okay. You set up your experiment for fluorescence microscopy either for wide-field or confocal. You have a complete selection in there with the database for various fluorochromes. You have a database in there for our available filter sets for excitation and emission in the microscope. You have all the laser lines available in there for our confocals and of course this is also a compromise where I fought kind of hard with our product management, you can also define your own settings. For example, if you do not have the honor of sitting in front of a Zeiss microscope but maybe you know another system. And back then I was like, hey guys I don't have a problem with that, why limit it?
Chris: Yes.
Johannes: We were the only ones who had this back then and I was like okay, if some other user wants to plan his experiments or check his settings with our app then yes, sure he should be able to. So these were options for comfort, for I don't know, so you could directly choose, of course. Those are the Zeiss emission filter number this and that or of course, obviously all of our laser lines for the confocals and then you have the chance to edit everything that is mostly fitting into the system that you are actually sitting in front of because, let's be honest, we love every microscopist out there, so everybody also should have been able to just use this app and we still do some more or less regular updates to it.
And then on the other of course we saw okay, we need a direct option for contact so we included this, you can type in the text with your contact data and send it directly to our service and support if you have some questions or need some details or have inquiries with us. There is our Facebook channel integrated, if you are into that stuff. You can go into the app and see what we are doing on Facebook. Obviously also our Twitter channel, we have some plans for the future to also maybe integrate the Flickr channel, but we will see. Also with the new IOS versions that are constantly coming out from Apple where we are going with the app for the future.
Chris: So let me stop right there for a second because I have a lot of questions. You said a lot of great things. So first of all I love how you say, 'the honor of sitting in front of a Zeiss' and we love all microscopists. And that's true, those people might be sitting in front of a competitor's microscope tomorrow, those people move around. And they might have an influence in the next purchase so that's just the right mentality I think.
Johannes: Exactly, exactly. This is like in the very beginning when we first thought about this app there was obviously from our product management coming a lot of ideas about yes, we can have preconfigured systems in there and then they have just to press their system configuration and then I was like okay, if you don't have that exact system configuration or if you don't have... maybe it really helped that I was quite new to this company, let me also put it like that.
Chris: Well you don't have the curse of knowledge then.
Johannes: Yes, yes.
Chris: That's the advantage is to not be…
Johannes: You know my field of view back then was also a bit larger probably. But I still really try to keep it that open I have to tell you.
Chris: And then I want to ask you about the app itself. So you are talking about all of these configurations. The app is helping you set up an experiment. You can tell me whether it interacts directly with the microscope or not or is it saying, “to use these fluorochromes, we recommend this filter set” and just making sure that all the things you are going to set up are going to work together, is it something like that?
Johannes: The second one. We definitely see in the future a possibility to directly connect the app with the system. For this we just need to have a bit more prerequisites in the system and in the instruments itself. So we have stuff that is called ACR (Automated Component Recognition), so the instrument and of course, obviously the attached workstation with our full Windows software knows automatically which filter sets and which parts are installed. So the system itself more or less already knows its configuration, but back then we did not have any proper way or let's say protocol to particularly wirelessly connect and also read out this configuration. So this is definitely something that is on the list for the future.
And I'm not saying too much here because this is also the trend where it goes that you have a better mobile and also wireless connection with people have a multitude of gadgets nowadays. They have their iPhone and their Google smart phones. They have all kinds of tablets. This is what they use in their private lives at home, so they also want to use it at some point, not even the normal jobs, but also the academic research. This is something which is definitely planned but currently you have to enter the configuration of your microscope manually. But of course it gets stored inside of the app so you can also not one but two, three, four, five microscope, different microscope configurations you can save inside of the app and then you can see okay I have my.. I don't know, CHO cells from the cell culture with those fluorophores and then they can check well okay, for example, which system best fits the imaging needs? Or how to configure the system best. And they don't have to sit in front of the system for that.
Chris: Right, and I don't want to go too far into the functionality now that I understand what it is. Let's talk a little bit about - now it clearly is a marketing tool, it is helpful for Zeiss users and other people to set up their experiments. So it is a way to get your brand in front of people even pre-purchase right?
Johannes: Exactly.
Chris: So I guess my next question would be did you work with outside developers or did you develop it internally? I want to talk about how you get something like that made.
Johannes: So for Light Lab it was an external agency, it was Next. They are called Next. Next Munich, also directly here it's like from our site in Munich where we have our offices, it's like maybe five kilometers so it was also a very direct collaboration to put it like that.
Chris: And for people who are thinking about developing an app, I don't know, I think a lot of companies have apps. I think we did a survey on the ACPLS, maybe half the companies are using them. Some people don't see a need for it, although I think there are many more needs than you can imagine. But was it difficult, does this agency have some experience in this area at all or is that not even a question? You find a good app developer and describe what you are trying to make and they are able to make it?
Johannes: Again, it is the second option.
Chris: Okay.
Johannes: So it really does not matter if they have experience in Life Sciences tools or if they are even, I don't know maybe even biologists or microscopists themselves, so this is usually absolutely not the priority when you are searching for developers. The only thing where we really had to focus on was that we did not want to work with freelancers or even with a team of freelancers because it could get difficult to get those projects done in the end because you can imagine a freelancer then gets a job at another company or he gets sick, or he doesn't like you anymore and wants to work for another company or another contractor so this was definitely... we wanted to talk with those guys and see, "okay do you have experience in mobile app development?" Do they understand what we are trying to accomplish and with those guys, if I remember back then in 2011 we talked about they as early as that they worked at some point at Disney, doing those... back in the old Nokia days you had some kind of.. it was called WAP or something, a very, very early way of doing some kind of app technology so they had their experience, they were a start up, and are still more or less a quite flexible start up.
We had our early meetings we talked with them and we tried to explain to them what this thing is supposed to do and we actually invited them over. We did some demos at our systems here in the Microscopy Labs in Munich. They had huge fun because most of them never sat in front of a high-end research microscope of course. So that was also very nice.
Chris: I haven't done that either, so...
Johannes: You should, you should.
Chris: Yes, I know. I'm going to book a ticket to Munich right after this call.
Johannes: Either Munich or we have wonderful labs in New York. So either way, we should make this happen somehow. So this was the part. We then sat together with some attached product managers and had some fixes afterwards and we just made sure that they understood what we wanted and that we had persons on our side that were very deeply into those system configurations that were very deeply into fluorescence microscopy and they just explained it to these external guys, to the developers, which was also a bit surprising for me. They very quickly understood what we wanted and they just did it. So this was also a great experience on that part.
Chris: Right, and that's exactly what I was looking for. Was it hard to explain and translate what you were trying to come up with to the developers?
Johannes: Not really.
Chris: But it's great and I'm assuming you have some beautiful interface that these guys are really good at, especially if they were working for Disney. Let's talk about the social media aspect. You've integrated this app with Facebook and Twitter, which I think is brilliant. How does that work? So they're inside the app, they can go look at your Facebook feed I guess.
Johannes: Yes.
Chris: But how can they contribute in a way that lets their colleagues see what's going on? Can they share?
Johannes: We integrated the Facebook and Twitter feeds from our global channels that we have. You can scroll through them, you can click on the postings, the articles that we have there and then we just use the options that are available by iOS. So you have all the usually available options of integrating with your own Twitter channel, retweet stuff from inside of the app. You can open the Facebook postings from the feed and also share them or like them with your Facebook network via the installed Facebook app so this is really just the stuff that iOS very, very easily gives to all the developers. So we have those interfaces and you just use them and integrate them into the app.
Chris: Nice.
Johannes: That was actually really the easiest part, I have to tell you. That was really the easiest part.
Chris: But I think it is a hugely valuable part. In fact, you are the first I think..So I interviewed about 10 companies talking about how they are using these smart phone apps or iPad apps and I think you are the very first one that has mentioned sharing something from your social media from within the app which I think is of course, you have this thing that people are using and they're liking it, and they're engaging with it and I do think to a degree I want to say maybe you have a different opinion, but microscopy lends itself to sharing in a way that a lot of other biological research might not. Do you agree or not? I’m just curious.
Johannes: Absolutely, in a respect that I always like to also tell this to my colleagues that in the end microscopy marketing, maybe it's the easiest marketing in the world because it is all about nice images. It's all about nice and wonderful images. It's the colorful, beautiful images from the confocals, from the super resolution microscopes. It's the high-resolution stuff from the electron microscopes. Everybody loves watching that stuff and so it's also like with our company claim “Make it Visible”, it really fits and we also see this with interactions with researchers and users on our Twitter channel now apart from the app also or with our Flickr channel. People also love sharing the images that they make. We love of course sharing our marketing imaging, our official imaging with the world. So it's more or less really ideal. To make the conclusion of this kind of metaphor I would really, really need to think hard when I would be working in the marketing of a company that does for example, PCR lightcyclers or something. I would really, really need to be extremely creative for that. In that respect we are really lucky guys with our great and wonderful imaging.
Chris: Well I watched your video on the plankton this morning on your blog which was fantastic.
Johannes: All credit there goes to Richard Kirby, he's a wonderful guy and we've worked together with him now for at least I think 10 years. He is one of the biggest Zeiss friends and advocates out there and we are so glad to have that guy. He is also in oceanic and marine biology. In the community, he is so well established, it's just really, really great just working together with him.
Chris: Well it really... it illustrated a fantastic story about how plankton are such a central part of, not just oxygen production, but just about anything you can imagine on this Earth has a tie to plankton. So that was a fantastic story illustrated with beautiful images and having David Attenborough narrate it was a coup.
But let's go back to social media, because I said that you are the only one so far I've mentioned or that I've interviewed that have integrated social sharing into their app. I think if you're going to be making an app and get people that engaged into your ecosystem, if you will, I think it is just a brilliant idea to make sharing part of it. Actually, I do know one other app. So I interviewed this company formerly called Zappy Labs, now I think they're called Protocols.io, and what they have, I don't want to derail this conversation but they have an app that helps people track their protocols in the lab. And there is some question about whether people actually want to use their smart phone in the lab for reasons of solvents and whatever. But when they modify a well-known protocol they can store it locally and then they can also share it and say “hey this works better for me than the original” and so on.
And the other interesting thing about it was, and this is kind of my next question to you is: do you collect data back from people's usage of the app? Because that's the purpose of this whole Protocols.io thing. Well it's not the purpose, but it is a benefit that companies can see how their protocols are being modified so that for product development they can see what people are using and also trends for the types of experiments people are developing. Do you have any thought about getting data back out of the app that you guys can look at for product development for example?
Johannes: We actually looked into this because, believe it or not, but I was in contact with those guys from Protocols.io already. We got in contact because they were of course also interested in what you already said. You know you not only have those lab protocols for your colony PCR, for your plasmid cloning, and whatnot, you also of course have those protocols for sample preparation for electron microscopy, for fluorescence microscopy. But since then, it was now I think one or two years ago, we did not look into it further because the thing is, from a protocol standpoint, from a sample preparation particularly for a microscope this is very, very much not only... It is extremely dependent on the one cell line that a given institute or research facility has under its hood.
Chris: It's so highly variable that there is no standard.
Johannes: Exactly. You could think about some very, very basic protocols. But then again when looking not only at light microscopy, but particularly at electron microscopy you have for various imaging tasks regarding which biological material is it? What do you want to do with it? Do you want to use the microtome to do 3D imaging? Do you want to use the ion cannon to do 3D imaging, the FIB-SEM. At the end we have of course, we have a lot of knowledge about those different kinds of sample preparation inside of our company and with the imaging specialists in our labs which also very, very gladly help users and new customers establishing new methods.
But at the end of the day it's really so much dependent on the model organism, on the special tissue that the researchers want to use, so we did not see too much sense in that for the time being. We offer some very general sample preparation protocols, for example, for super resolution. But even there we offer them as PDF as white papers to virtually anybody who is interested. But even in there we can only give very, very general hints about particularly what to do with the hardware, which slides are best to use, which cover glass is best to use and what's the ideal sample preparation. But we know for the ideal imaging everybody needs to adopt his own protocol.
Chris: Okay.
Johannes: So that was not the real focus about this.
Chris: Right. I think this is maybe my last question. If I've left anything out about discussing this app in particular we could go on and on I'm sure.
Johannes: We should!
Chris: Yes, we should. We should do another one. I think we will. And I'm definitely going to do a podcast with Lenny from Protocols.io but what have you done to promote this app? So how do you integrate it with the rest of your content marketing to make it popular besides the sharing aspect of it? How much effort did you have to put into publicizing the availability of the app? Do you do it through your sales team? Is there other content on your website? How does it work?
Johannes: To be honest we did not do too much actually. We featured it, back then, in some newsletters, maybe two or three newsletters of course, also the mail blast that you send out to everyone that is interested in microscopy and that are your customers anyway. We of course, also used then again the social media channels, Facebook and Twitter channels to raise awareness about the app, that we have it. What we saw over the last three or four years, when looking at the iTunes statistics, and I have to admit yes, it's only available for iOS at the moment. We have other plans with the future app developments so not supporting too much platforms natively but really trying to go platform independent.
We saw a very organic growth actually and this was really interesting because we did not push it out too hard. It was really like, okay, it's now our first shot at an app whatsoever. We did not do this before. We did not have too much experience with it. The name is Light Lab but it was also like a lab experiment for us actually. We thought hard about it, we thought hard about the options, we tried to make it as good as we could and then we just sent it out to the world and saw how it would live and grow, you know. It was so nice to see that there was organic growth. There was the first direct feedback from customers to our sales guys where they said "hey, this thing is really nice, thank you for doing this and for having it freely available." Then also the first direct feedback came, also what you previously asked about could you directly interact or connect the app on the mobile device with the microscope.
So it really grew and grew and grew. And now we are at numbers where we are really satisfied with how this first child of ours developed. So we are really happy there and we have also some more apps now. Again when you said, when we touched on this sharing and the imaging part this is something that we really promoted and we really focused on with for example, the Labscope and the Matscope app. This is where you directly connect with the small microscope with the wireless camera built into there. This is also where you directly snap an image from the sample that you have under your microscope and you directly can use any sharing option that is available on the device. So you can share it via email, you can share it via your Twitter account, you can share it via your Facebook. Everything there is integrated and this is also a feature that we know and that we see is also highly appreciated. So this just works out all the time.
Chris: Well that's just fantastic. I love the story about the growth. Now it turns out that was not my last question because you made me think of something else I've been curious about and I've seen when looking through apps on the store. Because you mentioned native apps and I'm curious about the level of support required for an app. So at some point an app may lose its usefulness or the usefulness isn't everything it could be. So have you had to put a lot of effort into maintaining the app otherwise adding features or updating it or something else? Because sometimes a company might make an app and put it out there and pretty soon no one is using it anymore because it just hasn't kept up and now you've got a thing sitting there that doesn't look good for your brand if it's not doing its job, right?
Johannes: Exactly. This is exactly the point. Let's be honest here for a minute. In a company, an app is a project.
Chris: Yes.
Johannes: This project gets a certain budget, it gets an approval. It has a delivery date and then the budget is ended, the project is finished and the app is out there. But then more or less the real work starts. Apple is now in the situation that they are pushing out a new major version of their operating system iOS every year. New devices and new flavors of the iPad with various screen sizes with screen resolutions also for the iPhone and the other stuff comes out maybe twice a year. So in theory for every update, hardware and software that Apple is pushing out you would need to check your app. Okay, is it still compatible, does it really show nicely still on the screen of the new devices? There may be new iOS features that you would really benefit and that you would really like to use and the main part is we also know that from our private lives because everybody in the world and their dog has an iPhone or any kind of smartphone today, you like it when you see, oh there is another update for this app. This is where I have to install the update, a bit of a Tamagotchi effect also.
Chris: Yes.
Johannes: There is a notification, oh I get a new update, maybe it has new features. If the app lies silent for months and for years, exactly as you said, you tend to forget that you have it. It looks maybe not as it is supposed to look on new devices. It crashes when there are major new operating system versions out there. So yes, you definitely have to take this into account.
Chris: Right.
Johannes: You need a constant validation of the app. You need to constantly think about, well okay 'can we improve this feature?' or what was the feedback which is also extremely valuable not only from users but from your own sales force. So this is definitely a problem that we also run into from time to time. Light Lab, you have to test it on the new hardware, you have to see okay, do we have a problem here? A lot of that stuff is covered by our contract with the developers, which I'm really glad about. But regarding new features, regarding new graphics design, Light Lab now looks a bit outdated also so there is some kind of major revision on the horizon. These are also the facts. If you start developing an app and a project and you see in the beginning that it's quite successful and people really like it. This is actually the moment when you need to start planning. Okay, we need to invest a bit more capacities, resources and money on it.
Chris: Yes. I ask because I have seen that happen based on my research. Then people might be inclined to think, oh if we make an app, we put it out there, as you say, we're done. But you're not done, it's like a newsletter. When you start a newsletter or any other content project there is some feeding that is required to keep it going and if you stop feeding it then it doesn't communicate the kind of commitment that you want to have for example.
Johannes: So in that respect I am also quite glad that we are also very much nowadays a software imaging company. So we have our ZEN imaging software for the windows PCs and this of course needs also constant updating, constant developing, hot fixing, service packs, so there is quite an understanding in this company, okay, if it is software you have to constantly work on it.
Chris: Right.
Johannes: But then the understanding is very much on our main software, so the ZEN imaging software which controls the microscopes, this has a certain constant budget and also resources regarding development and what not. But this app stuff, you know, it's like okay it's free and it's only for this gadget. It's something to play around so do we really need to invest money in this? It's a constant fight for budget. Nowadays, when I think back to 2011 and 2012 so nowadays there's really much, much more commitment also because we have more apps, we have not only this Light Lab but we have now a ZEN browser which can actually platform independently, access imaging on a server. We have the ZEN remote which directly interacts with the confocal, you can control your experiments, you can control the hardware. Nowadays, the apps really have a much higher value than they had some years ago.
Chris: Well yes, so it's all a fantastic story and I really appreciate you sharing that with me. I think we can wrap it up here. Let me ask you one question that I ask all of my or most of my podcast guests. I haven't asked everybody this question. I'm curious to know what you do in your free time when you're not working on apps and marketing communications. What do you do for fun?
Johannes: So you are really sure that I have still left some free time?
Chris: You're not the first person to say that. But if you had some free time, how would you spend it?
Johannes: For me, I'm actually not a sports person so any form of training of moving myself without any help of some engines or motors is like, it doesn't absolutely work for me. Free time, okay it's like I try to do a bit of walking to get my head cleared a bit. I'm very much into movies, so this is like, some colleagues call me the walking IMDB database.
Chris: Nice.
Johannes: Then of course also TV series, so this is mostly the stuff that keeps me down a bit and yes, just spending some time with family obviously, of course, this is also sometimes necessary, you can't do much about it. So no real fancy hobbies around, no rafting, no bungee jumping. This is like you know I get my adrenaline rush every day in my company so I don't need that when I have my free time left.
Chris: That's great. You're going to be my new source of movie reviews.
Johannes: Yes, we can actually maybe really try that.
Chris: All right, well thank you very much for joining me. This was fantastic.
Johannes: Thank you for having me.