GE
B2B , Energy & Sustainability
GE’s Air Filtration team grew fairly quickly, and mainly through acquisition. Which is great for the company, but not always so great for customers. In fact, this growth meant there were now multiple teams from multiple companies delivering mixed messages to the customer base. Customer service suffered, as did the group’s reputation.
The new management team challenged with reversing this trend turned to Mower to help find their point of differentiation, rebrand their group and then create an impactful campaign to communicate this new story to their universe—first to the internal stakeholders and team members who would live the vision daily, and then to the customers who would ultimately benefit from this new commitment.
Excited by this challenge, our insights and strategy team took a deep dive into three main areas: constituents, company and competition. We conducted secondary source analysis and customer interviews to get a clear understanding of the group’s constituency; put together stakeholder interviews, an internal brand audit and a collaborative mosaic to get the full internal view of the company; and completed a thorough communications analysis on the competition.
This exercise led us to develop several strategic directions for the stakeholders to consider—all differentiating, all true to the brand, all ownable.
The stakeholder team unanimously agreed that one strategy best captured their shared vision moving forward: Promises Kept. The idea that GE puts customer needs first, and that this group will deliver exactly what it promises, when it’s promised.
But anyone can say they’ll keep a promise. How do you prove it? Especially in a marketing campaign?
You start by getting the internal team—all of those who will be charged with actually keeping these promises—excited to be part of the campaign and eager to support the messages it conveys. So we kicked off this campaign with an internal global launch event—a simulcast to all of GE’s Air Filtration offices around the world, including a kickoff anthem video, related gifts for each employee and a passionate presentation by the president of the division.
Once the internal team was energized, we launched the external integrated marketing campaign, where we featured the actual GE subject-matter experts, each making their own personal, handwritten promise that they vowed to keep with their customers. Because these experts were so widely respected, we gave each their own mini-campaign, supported by print in appropriate verticals, social, digital and video. Each piece concluded with the signoff: “And that’s not just a promise. It’s the promise of something better.” And each subject-matter expert had their own unique content-rich landing page, where customers could connect on a more personal level.
The client has asked us not to share specific metrics, but we can say the campaign won an ACE first-place award, and GE’s customer service improved immensely at fulfilling the needs of customers, raising the overall reputation and boosting GE’s internal morale. Then again, those are just natural outcomes of creating authentic friendships.
By shifting GE’s customer service from price-oriented to people-oriented, and making a promise to affirm that, Mower gave GE an opportunity to repair customer relationships and make customers believe they’ll provide them with not only the best price and product, but also the best service—something extremely important to customers that competitors were missing.
Key Brand as Friend® drivers:
Hey! Our name is pronounced Mōw-rrr, like this thing I’m pushing.