Behind the microphone: brands as anchors in uncertainty
I came late to the science (and art) of marketing. With a communicator’s long-held skepticism and distrust of brands, branding and advertising and a counter-cultural upbringing, it is some turnaround that:
I am convinced, utterly, of the power and utility of a brand to do good.
When change brings uncertainty for people, brands provide an anchor-point of security — a known among the unknowns — and the neuroscience appears to bear this out.
In this episode of Discovery Matters I speak with Dr Uma Karmarkar at University of California San Diego about how people make decisions, and the role brands might have in the cognitive process. This is especially poignant timing as we had just separated from GE Healthcare and now stand independent, rebranded as Cytiva, within Danaher’s group of life sciences companies.
All very well, but the risk was we would lose our identity.
Nearly 7000 people gave up careers in GE, a powerful well-known and historically highly valued brand, to work for and build a new brand entirely, albeit for along established leader in its space.
Uma was clear as we discussed this kind of challenge: A brand helps in times of heavy cognitive load, or stress, by being a neurological shortcut to the ‘known’.
If a brand can be a cognitive shortcut, how can it help companies’ employees during organizational change and increased stress? By being a clear point of reference as to what the business stands for, its ambitions and what will remain the same as we evolve and change. We have leaned hard into this, and so far, early days, it appears to be working.
As we asked people to prepare for this leap into the unknown, we began, in April 2019, the process of defining our new company brand from the inside out. We ran workshops and ‘brand labs’ to ask nearly 7000 people ‘what do you want us to be when we become Cytiva?’
We combined output from these sessions and with deep customer insights into our reputation, and developed a continually evolving holistic company-wide exploration our ambitions as an organization. We made a clear statement to 7000 people about what they told us our brand stands for, and how we see the future as we pursue a clearly defined vision and mission.
This constancy, of vision, mission and clearly articulated brand developed by our people for our people, is helping us chart and navigate the course ahead. It’s not easy, we won’t get it all right, but it provides a point of reference, a cognitive short cut, that says: “We got this, now…to work on building the company we want to become.”
