Octave
Know the score
The challenge
The only certain thing in neurology is uncertainty.
If you live with MS, you’re managing a disease you can’t see. You might feel fine while damage quietly accrues, or feel awful while your scans look stable. Your neurologist is in the same boat: an MRI only shows lesions after they’ve formed, when it’s already too late to get ahead of them. So everyone does the only thing they can. They wait. And see.
Octave had built the science to end that waiting, and it was already working, with 500+ prescribers and 20,000+ patients on board. What it hadn’t built was a brand. The identity looked and sounded like a lab - precise, clinical, a little cold - which undersold both the rigor of the technology and the very human relief of finally knowing where you stand.
So Octave brought us in to build the foundation from the ground up. We created a messaging architecture, a complete brand identity, and a new website that had to land with two very different audiences: a neurologist deciding whether to trust a new test, and a patient deciding whether to hope.
Our approach
Two audiences. One score.
Doctors and patients want the same thing: a handle on the disease. They just talk about it in profoundly different languages: on one hand pathology, on the other everyday reality. Know the score. Three words that hold up in an exam room and on a billboard, with nothing lost in translation either way.
Put the score in the logo.
The Disease Activity Score charts as a run of peaks and valleys. So does the name: the A and the V of OCTAVE are up and down chevrons, the identity built into the wordmark.
Science with soul.
Octave is rigorous science, but its engine is rooted in human empathy. So the brand is both the microscope and the hand that holds it: precise enough to earn a neurologist's trust, human enough to reach the patient.
The work
Over four months, Squero delivered the full marketing foundation. We started with the words: a messaging architecture mapping what clinicians and patients each crave, fear, and need to believe, plus boilerplate copy in 25-, 50-, and 100-word cuts for each audience.
From there we explored brand identity directions against real touchpoints, then refined the chosen direction into a full system: logo, color, typography, photography, and illustration, all documented in guidelines.
Then we built the site. 10 pages written, designed, and developed in Webflow, from the homepage to the provider and patient journeys to the clinical resource center, with best practices across SEO, load time, and UX.
We partnered with Squero to transform our brand identity to reflect the category‑defining precision neurology leader that we are. The feedback from the market has been exceptional.
Doug Biehn, CEO, Octave Bioscience
The outcome
Octave went from a brand that looked like a lab to one that finally matches the soul behind it: a single, ownable identity, a message that holds up with neurologists and patients alike, and a website built to carry both. And because the platform was built around one idea - know the score - rather than one product, it’s ready to scale from MS into Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and whatever Octave measures next.
