When the business evolves, so must the brand

How Amgen built and manages its worldwide brand

Amgen is the biggest biotechnology company in the world, with a global reach and 20,000 employees. However, the biotechnology pioneer’s origins were more modest. It began in 1980 as Applied Molecular Genetics, with all the characteristics of a Californian, tech-style start-up: millions in venture capital, remarkable talent and boundless ambition.

Success brought with it the challenges that many fast growing companies expanding into global markets face. The corporate brand was becoming less and less relevant to an increasingly diverse set of audiences. In addition, the brand itself was becoming unwieldy and difficult to manage.

A brand strategy to match aspirations

A start-up moving to the big leagues, Amgen needed to convey a sense of stature to establish trust. The old brand personality – formal, bold and communicative of leadership – served the company well at the time.

However, as the company began to push into the global markets, it recognized that the time was right to recast its image. Amgen reached out to Tenet Partners to help them redirect the brand. Our team of designers charted the course for a new direction, one that shifted Amgen’s position toward innovation and commitment to the discovery of breakthrough therapies that can change people’s lives. The revitalized visual personality expresses the essence of Amgen: its human mission, optimistic spirit and rigorous scientific discipline.

Putting technology at the service of the brand

While the company grew, so did the need to optimize its brand management process. With the company expanding globally, simple tasks, such as approving a logo to be used in a sponsorship or getting the legal language right on a piece of collateral, were eating up valuable time and resources. Given the importance of Amgen’s mission, it was vital to have a process that would be efficient, freeing people to turn to other pressing matters.

Brand Ensemble™, Tenet’s brand asset management technology, allows the team to streamline many of those tasks by using a single, worldwide repository of information, standards, resources and workflows. By moving away from manual management practices, the Amgen brand team has been able to improve consistency and efficiency on a global scale.

For Amgen, one of the biggest benefits that comes with Brand Ensemble is automated advertising. This tool allows communications specialists, anywhere in the world, to quickly produce a corporate ad. This process saves weeks of back and forth, legal time and lets Amgen be in the market faster.

Positioning for continued success

The challenges that Amgen faced as it grew into a global biotech powerhouse show how brands – and the way they’re managed – need to mature over time. Building an enduring, viable brand takes the kind of smart leadership and forward vision that has marked Amgen since the beginning.

Taking care of the caregivers

How CenterLight Health Systems helped their employees embrace their brand

There’s a history of caring at CenterLight Health Systems that reaches back to 1920. Originally known as Beth Abraham, this institution has been an integral part of the diverse neighborhoods and ethnic communities in the New York metropolitan area.

With an unwavering commitment to providing quality managed care for the elderly, ill and disabled, the CenterLight parent company was operating in a challenging business environment, due to on-going regulatory changes in both the New York and federal health care policies. To stay ahead in this disruptive market, CenterLight has to continuously adapt and innovate. The leadership team and board saw that a single, unified brand for their individual long-term care companies, residential facilities and day centers would optimize resources, making the organization more competitive in the markets it serves.

The organization turned to Tenet Partners to help bring the new brand to life by enhancing, managing and implementing an institution-wide branding program. Over the course of six months, the Tenet team worked onsite to help CenterLight manage implementation of the program. This partnership resulted in a 20% increase in productivity for the CenterLight marketing team, an impressive number for a non-profit organization charged with doing more with less. Tenet also orchestrated a massive and exciting 24-hour Day One launch with simultaneous activities in facilities, a “countdown to launch” microsite that acted as a virtual brand gathering place, printed materials and live media events to introduce the brand to every employee and participants.

Shaping the CenterLight Culture for employees

Using the tools of service design, the Tenet team mapped the entire employee journey to find insights and innovations that would help instill the brand values from recruiting through onboarding and beyond. Tenet helped the Human Resources department rethink orientation by focusing on the importance of the CenterLight values and its culture of caring.

With over 4,500 employees who speak more than 75 languages, CenterLight also needed to share its values in a way that recognized the cultural and linguistic diversity of its workforce, those who care directly for members as well as those who interact only with their fellow employees.

Training to live the brand

Working with CenterLight’s senior leaders, Tenet developed realistic case studies to use as training tools in workshops with functional employee groups. Their personal experiences defined actionable behaviors that could bring the values of the brand to life. Tenet then used the employees’ definitions to inform headlines for a series of internal posters that champion the values in human ways using graphic humanistic illustrations that cut across all diversities. To insure that the values and behaviors would be communicated to all employees, Tenet next hosted train-the-trainer workshops and created a manager’s playbook that will help CenterLight keep their values relevant and present.

Citrix Systems

When a startup grows up, so must its brand.

2008 marked an important year in the growth of Citrix Systems. Having just broken the $1 billion revenue mark and completed numerous successful acquisitions, Citrix had earned its seat at the “big table” as a contender for leadership in desktop virtualization and cloud infrastructure solutions. Global companies, like Microsoft, were knocking at the door and looking for partnership opportunities. It quickly became obvious that something had to be done to give the brand the stature it deserved and to create the brand experience clients were looking for.

Now a strategic partner with Microsoft and a key competitor to big-league players like Cisco and Oracle, Citrix had to shed the ad-hoc branding practices of its days as a scrappy tech startup. Citrix reached out to Tenet Partners for help. Starting with a re-tuning of the brand positioning from functional-based (access) to a broader, benefit-driven strategy (infrastructure), Tenet’s team of strategists and designers worked together to translate the new direction into a brand identity that expressed openness, transparency and scale.

Now that it was playing in a decidedly different league and appealing to a much broader market, meaningful connections with their customers were going to be key for success for Citrix. To that end, it was vital to create a more robust and clearly defined partnership and ingredient branding program. Tenet helped rationalize, structure and communicate the expanded program. The program was recently voted one of the best channel programs in the market.

Citrix continues its growth trajectory, doubling their revenue to just under $3 billion in six years. When customer experience and business strategy align, the sky’s the limit.

Opening express lanes to quality mobile video experience

Vantrix brings its vision and commitment to multi-screen content distribution

Looking beyond the challenge to the opportunity that laid ahead, Vantrix, a company born out of the alliance of two leading Canadian industry innovators in optimization technologies, saw how the customer experience in the mobile video arena was falling short of its full potential. Technology hurdles stood in the way of optimized content – mobile TV, video on demand, multimedia alerts and messaging, user-generated content and video share – being delivered in a seamless fashion to audiences everywhere and on every mobile devices.

Vantrix’s vision: change the paradigm by developing software that would enable content owners and service operators to optimize their media processing operations and give their customers the highest-quality media experiences on any device, at the lowest possible cost. Major corporations including ABC News, Orange, T-Mobile and The Weather Channel were ready for a solution.

The beginning of a new era in telecom

Vantrix was looking for a powerful way to signal its arrival and express the transformative nature of what the company was bringing the marketplace. Working with the executive leadership team and the organization’s investors, Tenet Partners repositioned Vantrix around its industry-leading technology and its ability to take something complex and reshape it into something simple. And this is where the Vantrix brand idea took root, in a simple yet almost revolutionary phrase: “We make mobile video work.”

A vision for everyone to see

Next, our design strategists explored a number of conceptual directions to support Vantrix’s future-focused strategy. The team quickly narrowed in on the human eye as a metaphor for what Vantrix delivered. The logo represents the impressive structure and function of the human eye. It alludes to both the end-user experience and the integrated, seamless way Vantrix works with its customers.

Launched at the CTIA Wireless Conference in San Francisco, the new brand helped Vantrix capture imaginations and mindshare. It set the stage for them to define how multimedia content should be processed and exchanged over wireless networks. Today, Vantrix’s technology is part of everyday life for millions of mobile content consumers, worldwide, a testament to its ability to continue to “shape how the world experiences media”.

Analytics: the confidence of fact-based decisions

How data and analytics measure the pulse of brand health

When you have a brand with as rich a history as Transamerica, the 100-year old private holding company for various life insurance companies and investment firms, maintaining and building value for that brand is vital. Reliable data on a brand’s performance relative to its industry, and over time, is essential for guiding sound investment decisions. For over a decade, Transamerica has turned to us as a trusted partner to help provide that data.

Transamerica counts on consistent measurement of brand health to assess the impact of current advertising campaigns, such as “Transform Tomorrow,” while ensuring that long-term brand and communication investments stay on course.

An audience that provides unique perspective and continuous benchmarking

Transamerica is able to continuously track brand health metrics for an audience aligned with its major consumer segments, utilizing our research panel of business leaders, affluent consumers, retail investors and opinion influencers. With our current actionable insights, Transamerica can identify trends, such as brand momentum, and consider investing to create additional brand value, when that opportunity matters. Similarly, Transamerica can keep a watchful eye on key competitors to identify disruptive forces and shifts in their competitive landscape.

Transamerica uses our BrandPower benchmarking database to gain a broad view of the financial services landscape, while keeping a bird’s-eye view on their direct competitors in their Life Insurance sector.

An accurate historical view provides vital intelligence for future decision making

To guide important decisions during both a healthy economic climate with growth opportunities, as well as during turbulent times, Transamerica can count on our reliable set of historical data to inform future decisions. For example, a clear understanding of past financial crises, and their impact on long-term brand health, helps Transamerica gauge the risk of disruptive trends that may surface at any time.

During a financial crisis, insurance industry leaders show greater brand resilience, while industry followers’ brand health suffers severely.

Understanding past financial crisis and time to recover provides valuable insights for current and future decisions

The data revealed that the perception of insurance companies, and their favorability – a key indicator of brand health – declined sharply both before and during the last crisis. As a whole, the insurance industry has yet to recognize a full recovery to brand health metrics, such as reputation.

Learning from the past – prepared for the future

Always aware, Transamerica is able to anticipate new opportunities and risks sooner so that their team can be prepared to safeguard its cherished brand for the next 100 years.

What’s Brewing?

The Thermos® 360° commuter mug features a lid solution designed by the Verv team more than 10 years ago. And it’s still a hot item on the shelves at Target, Amazon and Walmart in several configurations. What is this innovation and why has it remained a category leader for over a decade?

Getting a Grip on the Problem

Thermos® challenged us by asking, “What’s next in our category?” It was a category that had seen little innovation beyond styling. No one had looked at the opportunities to truly delight users. But we did. After traveling to work with more than a dozen commuters, our consumer visits uncovered these three challenges:

Locking Down the Solution

Our design thinking approach engaged designers with users to surface this initial concept early in the program. And it was a winner. A rotating lid that has three settings:

• Locked down
• Venting
• 360° drinking

Problems Solved

The Road to Success

This innovation has profitably endured and proliferated for years. Here’s why:

1. We were quick to identify the problems and define what we were solving for in a user-centric way.
2. We leveraged users to inspire rather than direct iterative-concept ideation.
3. We designed a single, efficient, intuitive and elegant solution that solved a bunch of real-life problems.
4. As a modular unit, the lid could be grafted onto any cup body to transform it visually and functionally.

Challenge

LG was seeking to gain share in the refrigerator category with a next generation 3-door offering that would surface and address unrecognized needs. Solutions involved features and functionality that would be intuitive to use and highly visible on showroom floors.

Methodology

Design thinking tools engaged target consumers with our design innovators and the client team to uncover fresh insights and inspire real-time preliminary sketched concepts. Our methodology included in-home observation and ideation, iterative concept generation sessions and interactive concept refinement.

Insights

“The stuff I need always migrates to the back of the fridge…lost or forgotten.”

“My kids just stand there with the door open letting all the cold air out.”

“I hate having to hunt for those everyday, go-to items.”

“I’d like my kids to know what’s off limits and what’s up for grabs.”

Impact

This work provided LG with several in-market innovations including Door-in-Door^TM feature, the Blast-Chiller^TM Beverage Cooler, Tall Ice & Water Dispensing Bay, and LED Showcase Lighting, among several others.

Delivering a consistent story to investors around the world

Equity investing has changed radically in recent years. Active portfolio management isn’t what it used to be, thanks to instant access to information and analysis, fee pressures and the rising popularity of passive investing. Increasingly, institutions and individuals have turned to “barbell” portfolio strategies: using low-fee, passive solutions for most assets under management, while placing the remainder in higher-risk and presumably higher return investments as a way to beat the market. That trend has caused a great deal of capital to flow into vehicles that require no management at all.

As a result, active portfolio managers are feeling more pressure. Even with the markets at all-time highs and a long bull run, the same supply of active managers must now compete for fewer actively managed assets. And yet, the underlying idea of active management remains as valid as ever. What’s needed is a way to tell a compelling and understandable story that makes the value-add clear in what can be a highly technical field.

A unique firm calls for a unique value proposition

Intech is a specialized asset management firm serving institutional investors worldwide. With more than $52 billon in assets under management and a 30-year track record, it is a well-established and respected presence in the marketplace. Like its peers, Intech had been experiencing the adverse impact of changing perceptions about portfolio construction. It was time to sharpen the firm’s value proposition and brand communications to emphasize the value it brings to clients’ portfolios. Intech’s management and sales team knew there was an opportunity to bring more attention to the firm—its distinctive portfolio management approach. This methodology, based on Stochastic Portfolio Theory originally developed by the company’s founder, captures excess returns by rebalancing volatility in a given portfolio on an ongoing basis. Yet, the firm’s leadership was having difficulty consistently communicating its value-add on a global basis; the key points of differentiation were getting lost. The major challenge was the method’s highly technical nature. Intech had found it very difficult to convey the advantages in simple ways that clients’ pension consultants could readily understand. Complicating this was inconsistent messaging around the world; global clients might hear one part of the methodology emphasized in Japan, but a different one in Australia.

Finding a new path to differentiation

Intech management decided to do a reset—a robust global rebranding program that would help identify its strengths, discover new ways to overcome potential weaknesses, and refresh the look and feel of the brand.

Taking the time to formulate a new brand strategy would also provide a valuable opportunity to reach out to dozens of constituents—clients, consultants, employees and sales representatives—and gain actionable insights on existing perceptions and expectations for the future.

Intech called on Tenet to lay the strategic groundwork for a repositioning of the brand, by developing a comprehensive understanding of how clients, consultants and employees viewed the company. Tenet’s extensive program of stakeholder interviews yielded critical insight into perceptions and the brand experience from every perspective.

Strategic insight shapes the brand

The research uncovered proof of the perceived technical expertise and steady, client-centric engagement that had made Intech successful, as well as confusion about what truly differentiated the firm. Through attribute-sorting exercises that forced prioritization, core strengths were revealed. The attributes that were seen by clients as most valued and distinctive when thinking of the Intech brand rose to the top:

• Mathematical
• Consistent
• Volatility experts
• Rebalancing

Armed with a deep understanding of Intech’s expertise, culture, clients and the marketplace, Tenet and Intech teamed up to build a global communications platform for its new brand. Consensus around the brand attributes set the stage for a refreshed value proposition and gave direction for new content, crafted to convey the Intech story more clearly in markets around the world.

Tenet’s research findings also surfaced in the form of a new tagline, “Harness volatility.” That simple phrase goes straight to the heart of the Intech advantage, by speaking to how the firm uses stock price volatility to generate positive returns for clients.

During development of the visual brand identity, Tenet’s strategy, content and design teams worked closely together, leveraging the strategy work to capture the essence of Intech’s value proposition. The visual elements of the logo and design system work to convey key ideas, evoking the forward and upward growth Intech is known to deliver to clients thanks to their tested and proven mathematical formulas. That visual presence complements the content approach, communicating in multiple ways to drive home the value proposition more clearly.

In the end, it’s about capitalizing on existing strengths

Refreshing the Intech brand gave the company an opportunity to reestablish itself as an industry leader with a clear vision for the future. But equally important, it showed that Intech has always been on a positive, well-thought-out path. Casting its key strength—a proven ability to harness volatility and deliver value—in a new way is enabling Intech to move forward and meet the challenges of an evolving investment landscape with renewed confidence.

Greater clarity for Epiq

How repositioning a legal services pioneer created new understanding in the marketplace – and inside the company

A pioneer and leader in the legal services and technology solutions space, Epiq recognized that their growing and complex array of business offerings was creating a challenge. After years of strong opportunistic growth, the company found itself presenting a fragmented, product-based image to the marketplace. In effect, the company’s successful expansion strategy had diluted the impact of its brand.

Epiq began taking strategic steps to reposition the company and Tenet Partners was called on to help. The goal: to transition the brand from a technology-based document review company to a value-added service partner known for handling a wide range of highly complex legal challenges for corporations, law firms, financial institutions and government agencies.

A new focus on what makes Epiq unique

We began by refining Epiq’s purpose statement and core values to embody the principles and aspirations of the organization. The values were constructed to be meaningful and actionable across the company.

Recasting the company’s purpose and values was key to powering internal change. Complementing that shift and telegraphing it to the marketplace called for a new visual identity, inspired by the differentiating nature of Epiq’s global scale, high-quality staff and service. Tenet contemporized the Epiq logo and developed new design elements, including a color palette, imagery style, typography and distinctive graphic elements, which brought together the company’s many and diverse business lines in a fresh, unique visual expression.

Reconstructing the website to meet the needs of many

Moving the Epiq brand away from its product-based image met a key competitive need. When law firms, corporations, financial institutions and government agencies search for a partner, they are looking for the one who can ease their burden, a partner who understands what they need, has the right expertise and can deliver the outcomes fast. Accordingly, Epiq’s online presence needed to communicate more powerfully.

A central goal of Epiq’s new website was to allow users in different market segments to easily discover information and navigate the company’s complex offerings in a highly efficient and compelling way. To do this, Tenet conducted an interactive work session with managers across all business lines and functions to discover what the site should deliver to visitors. The task was challenging due to audience diversity: law firms and corporations using eDiscovery and document review services, law firms using bankruptcy case management software, and administrative services and trustees managing large-scale class action claims administration.

With this insight in hand, Tenet created an information architecture based on solutions organized to align with user’s needs in different market segments. A library of visual icons was created to help differentiate product and service offerings, helping users to find information at a glance.

Investment in the brand that drives results Epiq’s new positioning, coupled with the visual identity system and website, elevated the brand’s stature and enabled its designers and communicators around the globe to present a cohesive brand expression whether in the U.S., Europe or Asia.

More importantly, the changes provided a strong platform that helped make Epiq an attractive acquisition opportunity for private equity firms. In 2016 Harvest Partners and OMERS took action resulting in the combination of Epiq with DTI Global to create the first billion-dollar global legal process outsourcing company just eleven months after the brand refresh was launched.

Challenge

Samsung asked us to identify unmet needs and pet peeves among washer buyers then exploit them with new features.

Methodology

Our design thinking approach uncovered the struggle and inconveniences consumers face in needing to wash different garments separately. They worry about maintaining their fabrics but often don’t have time to run extra loads.

Insights

“Too many loads, not enough time…”

“Most washers all look the same at the showroom… you really have to do your research to know what you’re looking at.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever looked at the owners manual…”

“Some items need super-scrubbing, others need a gentle touch…or they get destroyed!”

“All too often separate loads have to wait…or I end up just throwing it all in together.”

Impact

Provided Samsung with a distinctive offering that defies format convention and delivers on a truly desired consumer wish.

Recognition

2017 International Design Excellence Award (IDEA) Gold Winner