Can brands be human?

Brand Forum 2018 was an exciting opportunity to explore the most effective trends and resonant practices in the expression of leading brands — how we take our ethos and offering to the market.

I was invited to speak on the topic, Mind the Gap —Bringing Brands and Customers Closer Together before an audience of stellar local and international brand communicators. My fellow inspiring presenters — Susan Karson, Chief People, Marketing & Corporate Affairs Officer at MLC Life Insurance, and Kelly Ryan, Chief Marketing Officer of the Western Bulldogs — brought insights both diverse and complementary to my experiences. Thanks Susan and Kelly, it was great to share a stage and ideas with you!

How does GE bring customers closer to the brand? And how does the experiential branding of events and places, rather than pushing goods and services, accelerate impact? What differentiates an authentic brand experience from a contrived one?

I love this theme because creating a real human connection between brand and customer is so pertinent in the world we live in today, for three reasons:

1.     Customers are more sophisticated than ever. They expect more of brands. And there is a rising scepticism in relation to brands, unless they can show that they are authentic and driven by a higher purpose.

2.     People don’t just want to be served content or to passively consume stories. They want to experience the brand. And technologies, such as virtual reality are enabling an ever richer and more authentic experience.

3.     Our lives have become a contradiction, in that, for many people, the more social-media connected we become, the more isolated we are. As a result we’re seeing an intense craving from people to belong and to connect as humans.

So how does that inform the communications and brand expression of GE?

Well, I’m lucky to work for a brand that’s globally iconic, that’s been around for 125 years and that creatively reinvents itself to be relevant to its customers, to the times, and to the future. But, working in such a dynamic environment comes with its challenges.

You might not always see GE, but we are literally everywhere. When you turn on your lights you may not realise that every electron in Australia passes through GE technology. When you catch a flight, there’s a 70% chance that it’s powered by a GE jet engine. If you’re pregnant there’s a 60% chance you’ll be scanned by a GE ultrasound.

So we have this proud heritage and ever evolving technological edge in industries that impact people’s lives. At the same time GE is going through the biggest transformation in the company’s history – that is, to become a digital-industrial company.

So for us the challenge is how do you take a brand imbued with reverence and turn it into something that’s relevant?

We focus on two things:

First, we always try to express the human side of what we do; we strive to be accessible —a brand that people can relate to.

In doing so, we tell the stories of the people at GE, what they’re working on and, most importantly, how they are changing lives around the world. Although we are a mission-driven company, and our purpose is to solve the toughest world problems, GE is ultimately about people.

So we tell these stories: of the engineer who’s finding ways to bring electricity to the one billion people in the world who as yet have no access to this enabling technology; of the scientist who’s working to find a cure for cancer through our Life Sciences group. By hearing, reading and experiencing such human stories and connecting on an emotional level, people start to fall in love with a brand.

Secondly, we give ourselves runway to experiment. Our founder was inventor, Thomas Edison, so experimentation is very much part of our DNA. We constantly push ourselves to take the way people experience our brand to an inventive level.

For example, we recently took a scientific approach to engineer a limited-edition bottling of hot sauce which we called 1032 Kelvin – which is the temperature at which all things start to break down. Key to the promotion was the special packaging of silicon carbide that we designed for the sauce. One one of the toughest materials in the world, silicon carbide also happens to be the key building block of heat-resistant super materials known as ceramic matrix composites (CMCs). The link? GE developed these super durable and light CMCs for use in the hot sections of the latest jet engines and gas turbines.

We manufactured only 1,000 bottles of 1032 K and it was sold out within a few hours. It’s still talked about!  

Some of our most successful campaigns happen when we invite people to participate and engage. As I mentioned, we know that our customers and our broader audience don’t just want to be served up content or to passively consume stories. They want to experience them. The key here is to give ourselves the freedom to experiment and the tolerance to fail.

One experiment that resonated particularly well with one of our target communities — software engineers and data scientists — was called Tweeting Machines. We wanted to engage the coding community in the world of connected machines.

A little bit of context: GE has pioneered the Industrial Internet, which is now widely deployed for optimising, monitoring, and predicting problems and possibilities for the world’s vast installed base of industrial and healthcare technology.

I’m particularly proud of the Tweeting Machines campaign because it was created here by my team in Australia and globally scaled. We worked with the talented tech tribe at Clemenger BBDO to create Twitter conversations between GE machines, such as a CT scanner and a wind turbine. As can happen on social media, the machines formed alliances, argued, even fell in love. But hidden in their conversations was a coding challenge aimed at the world’s best software engineers and data scientists. The competition was fierce and it took two weeks before a 29-year-old Hungarian physicist cracked the code!

On a more pop-culture level, GE’s science-fiction podcast, The Message, was downloaded more than a million times in its first eight weeks, and it continues to be discovered and enjoyed by many more thousands of people. Over the eight-episode series, The Message engaged listeners in an intriguing story about a team trying to decode a message from outer space — again, the theme was the growing relevance and importance of data and our ability to read it, decode it. Our audience took The Message to #1 on iTunes.

That’s just a small sample of how our brand-communications strategy is to creatively experiment and tap into the Zeitgeist of humanity.

At the very heart of it, successful brands are personal. Yes, GE is one of the biggest companies in the world. We employ around 300,000 people and operate in 175 countries. But I think of our brand as big and small at the same time. What I mean is that big has to be personal. Big has to be human. Nobody wants to interact with a company that feels like a company. People want to interact with people.

To this point, our latest advertising campaign, launched this year, talks to the how but also the why of our brand. Our overarching message is, “Technology is how we do things. People are why we do things.” I love this campaign, and have particular affection for the character of the grandmother who is unaware that her flight is powered by GE jet engines, she’s just so happy to be travelling to see her grandson perform in his school play. The secret sauce? Revealing the undercover relevance of our brand to humans!