GE has been around for 130 years. It has 300,000 employees, ranks 11th on the Fortune 500 with $140 billion in annual revenue, and its brand is considered the 10th most valuable in the world.
No pressure to rebrand that. But rebranding is what GE has been doing for more than a decade (you don’t turn an ocean liner quickly).
GE created a new brand architecture that organized over 3,500 products into 11 categories focused around integrated solutions. As their branding agency Wolff Olins put it, ”They had the capability to build and equip a whole hospital, yet were selling it piece by piece. What their customers needed was a joined-up relationship, rather than a series of transactions for individual products.”
After 23 years, in 2003 they changed their slogan from “We Bring Good Things to Life” to “Imagination at Work”, and allowed for the use of much more color and variation in their brand identity. (Which reminds me of working on collateral with an IBM client who once pleaded, “Just make it any color other than blue.”)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpDIEJrog3s
Now GE is going even further by integrating digital into its legacy manufacturing messaging. Many of their playful new ads are aimed as much at potential employees as customers. Featuring a young engineer who has to explain to his family and friends that he will actually be writing code at this manufacturing company, the ads use the tagline, “The digital company. That’s also an industrial company.”
As GE CMO Linda Boff explains, they call it being a “digital industrial” company. It’s an expression of how software that lets machines talk to one another –the Internet of Things — is central to their future growth.
The move of their headquarters from Connecticut’s suburbs to Boston’s Innovation District waterfront reinforces this new branding, too. Their new headquarters will encourage people to use public transportation and bikes by only have 30 parking spaces, and includes such features as a rooftop solar power system and green roof.
Architecture as branding.
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