How to evolve and align an iconic healthcare brand with a new vision for the future?
Q&A with Cochlear
From one project to the next, we find it’s helpful to pull back the curtain on the branding process to reveal different perspectives and share new insights.
Whenever you rebrand an organisation, the process is never the same twice – each and every experience is full of its own twists and turns. And so we asked one of our clients, Kirsten Impey, to take us on a deeper dive and share her perspective on rebranding Cochlear.
A little bit of background
Kirsten Impey is Global Director, Corporate Communications, Awareness & Brand at Cochlear – she guided the marketing team and the organisation at large through the rebrand. Plus, Kirsten’s ongoing role is focused on building the brand’s role and value across the customer experience, from building brand awareness at the top of the marketing funnel to converting recipients of a cochlear implant into advocates for the brand.
Cochlear is the global leader in implantable hearing solutions, having pioneered the technology to create the world’s first cochlear implant – an Australian innovation that has now helped more than 700,000 people of all ages overcome hearing loss to lead full and active lives.
You may have heard me write or talk about how a change in business naturally – in fact, in many cases, necessarily – precipitates a change in brand. In the case of Cochlear, so much had changed about their business in the past two decades, but not their brand.
Here’s a Q&A with Kirsten on what it’s like to write a new chapter in a global success story: how to evolve and align an iconic healthcare brand with a new vision for the future?
Why was 2019 the right time for Cochlear to review its brand?
Kirsten: Cochlear has been the global leader in implantable hearing solutions for 40 years, ever since the Australian pioneer, Professor Graeme Clark, invented the multi-channel cochlear implant. When the company first started, it was a completely new technology to help manage hearing loss.
For the first thirty years of the business, children born with hearing loss were the main recipients of the technology and healthcare professionals were the main customer. But by the end of the 2000s, all that was starting to change. With ageing global populations, more older adults needed help with their hearing. A growing base of recipients needed upgraded external processors. And consumers had become a lot more involved in healthcare decision-making. All of this meant a shift in brand and communications in order to reach new audiences through digital channels.
We had completed a brand audit and so we already had an understanding that there were some challenges that needed to be resolved in order to strengthen and evolve our brand identity.
We had our new five-year business strategy in play, and that supported the need for our brand to work harder – we knew that it could be more visible, relevant and differentiating.
Our launch timeline not only aligned with our business strategy but also supported a suite of new product launches coming to market.
On top of that, we were heading into our 40th anniversary year and that gave us another runway to establish and embed the refreshed brand in the market. Forty years in this category is a very long time to celebrate and, as the category's creator let alone leader, we naturally wanted to demonstrate our experience, its longevity and sustainability, and to share our origin story. It was also a great way to reconnect with all of our customers, employees and partners, introduce our new brand and say thank you for being part of our journey.
Looking back now, the timing was right in terms of organisational strategic alignment, the transformation that was happening in the business – and the need for a brand fit for the future.
What were the key objectives?
Kirsten: One objective was driving global consistency – one company, one brand, and a global brand experience to boot.
We knew that we lacked consistency in the market and, in some cases, we were actually diluting our brand efforts. For us that meant wasted time and dollars reinventing the look and feel of all our marketing around the world. For the customer, it meant a different brand experience every time they opened a new brochure.
We needed to bring clarity and consistency with a new brand strategy and a brand architecture that would support our growing portfolio of products and services into the future.
A second objective was customer-centricity, specifically balancing our technology focus with that true, emotional experience for a customer. At the heart of it, Cochlear was born an engineering company and inherently we have always been focused on our technology. And that's not a bad thing. However, we recognised that we needed to shift from that pure product perspective to become more brand-led. We needed to create a more emotional connection with our brand – by not being so widget or feature-focused – which is important for people coming into the marketing funnel, let alone once they become recipients of a cochlear implant.
And a third opportunity was differentiation. As the market leader and creator of the category, we have a unique origin story to tell. With increasing competition in the implantable hearing category, we knew we had to leverage our position and stand out. We understood that we could do a lot more by investing in our masterbrand and creating a compelling brand story – which in fact was something we didn't have but knew we needed.
What was critical for success?
Kirsten: This was a question of branding from the inside out.
To get the right foundations in place, it was initially a change management initiative. So, success was very much about educating our people – embedding our new brand strategy and driving adoption of the new brand identity system across the organisation.
We spent a lot of time upfront, investing in employee education and brand training, setting up the brand hub and all the infrastructure to make sure that our people had all the right tools, training and processes. I'm not sure you would have to do that so much in other organisations, but I think that was important for us. And part of that was because we don't have a huge amount of resource – we don't have a large brand team, so we needed to make sure that our organisation was brand-fit and understood how they could support and drive our strategy.
I also reflect back on some of the debates we were having around the creative for the refreshed brand identity. How worried we were about certain elements. How many different shades of yellow we reviewed – was it twenty? How we felt we needed to lock it down so very rigidly. And yet it's so interesting to see how it's all been embraced without any issues in terms of compliance.
And I think that's because we invested upfront in educating our people about the brand strategy and the brand identity system. Plus, the brand guidelines are very comprehensive and everyone is comfortable with them now.
What challenges and opportunities did you identify as part of the rebrand?
Kirsten: The biggest challenge, and opportunity, was internal alignment on the ‘why’ – why we should invest in a new brand strategy right now when there were so many other organisational priorities requiring resources and investment at the time.
We knew a rebrand could solve many of our problems, but not everyone was aligned on why it was important for Cochlear to rebrand now. So much so that one fundamentally important step was for us to challenge our own assumptions. You and the FutureBrand team helped us to do just that – to challenge not only why it was important but also how it could create value. It helped to bring our executive team and leaders on the journey. Because investing in a new brand costs money and takes time, it's not a short-term decision. Ensuring our leadership was comfortable and aligned on the reason why we were doing it was critical.
How did the brand strategy set the platform for the brand identity and experience?
Kirsten: The clarity provided by the brand strategy, the articulation of the brand architecture, and the development of a new brand identity system and narrative have each played an integral role – so that now the masterbrand and sub-brands work together and we have a strong brand proposition.
The portfolio narrative is now defined – even our brand language and tone of voice is much more single-minded in telling our story. Before the rebrand, we didn't have that integrated view. Everything now is connected to our strategy and directional. In terms of planning, it gives a clear structure and role to everything we do, decisions are easier and there is less debate, particularly around our product sub-brands.
As always, one of the big challenges was the subjectivity around the creative for the new brand identity. For some, it was breaking something that wasn't perceived to be broken. For others, they were asking whether we were going to be bold and take a leap into something that looked very different.
People can have very different perspectives, and that was why it was so vital that we kept referring back to the brand strategy and the idea at the heart of how the brand identity system was designed. Once people understood how the brand identity had been created, how it was based on Graeme Clark's discovery, it all made sense.
One of the core elements of our new brand is a design system that connects to our origin story. The ‘shell device’ connects to the story of Professor Graeme Clark’s discovery at the beach that saw him take a shell and blade of grass to solve the problem of how to insert an electrode into the ear. The shell device is a metaphor for the inner ear and provides a design system to help achieve global consistency.
When the market research came back to say that our customers saw the same references in the brand identity system – Graeme Clark's discovery, the cochlea, the innovation journey, and even ears – that validation gave the organisation confidence in the decision to proceed with a bold new creative. It's connected to our origin story. It's distinctive and ownable. And it definitely stands out from our competitors.
What did the experience teach you about managing the Cochlear brand ongoing?
Kirsten: It's changed the conversation internally.
We weren't just delivering a brand strategy, identity and some brand guidelines, we needed to look at the whole system. Consequently, it impacted people, processes, some structures, our technology, all of those different dynamics needed to be considered if we wanted to embed and drive change.
I can confidently say we have a real brand mindset now. The brand is talked about a lot in the organisation, it's not just part of our five-year global strategic marketing plan, it's very much front and centre now. It's provided the company’s ‘north star’ and it's very integrated into how we work.
What's more, it's very unifying, especially for a marketing function where we see the usual tensions between global, region and country. From a culture perspective, it has helped drive an enterprise mindset and pushed us forward in ways that perhaps we didn't realise – there have been lots of positive knock-on effects for global marketing, above and beyond the rebrand.
We've built trust and much stronger relationships with our regions and countries too by working through the complexity together. We have an effective brand council, and we spend a lot of time making sure that they are clear on what we were trying to achieve and empowering them accordingly.
What did rebrand mean for your people? – and how did it impact the employee experience?
Kirsten: We’re still building our capability, and there's more and more global transformation work underway. From the perspective of internal unification and cultural alignment, the refreshed brand has been a good example of enterprise-wide change.
I was quietly confident, but also a little cautious, that we might not get that employee buy-in. However, the tailored brand training helped us gain a lot of traction with employees. From an internal perspective, we spent a lot of time on the why – why it matters and what role employees play. Frankly, we hadn't ever done that before, and now it's embedded in everything as part of the employee experience – from the onboarding process to how the brand is experienced on-site. We've done a lot of work to make sure that our people are capable of bringing our brand to life and that we continue to drive that consistency.
When we were launching the rebrand, the pandemic was just starting. It was a big deal for employees who had a lot of pride in the brand and needed something new to hold onto. It’s genuinely satisfying to see from our engagement survey that more than 90% of Cochlear employees now feel strongly connected to the brand and its mission.
How are you measuring the impact of the rebrand on the business?
Kirsten: We've got a lot of data and insights, and finding meaning in that is vital in order to continually evolve, measure and build our brand.
The investment is paying off, we see strong employee adoption. Our Brand Health tracker gives us lead indicators and we are seeing favourable shifts on key measures. Customer sentiment and engagement have seen uplifts, product launches and campaigns are delivering results, and we are seeing a positive impact on both customer lead-generation and talent acquisition.
The brand has also helped us streamline in areas and create efficiency gains, for example the quality and speed of content creation and subsequently the speed of approval processes.
What’s in Cochlear’s future?
Kirsten: Our biggest barrier continues to be awareness and helping people understand the value of hearing to their health as well as the cost of inaction – there’s so much education still required.
In terms of what’s next for brand, we're exploring behavioural research and digging into our customer journeys to validate the brand’s expression in those key moments of the customer experience.
It’s been nice to reflect and, looking back, I can’t quite believe how far we’ve come. It’s been a journey for us to get here, and thanks to you and the team at FutureBrand for being part of the ride. I’m grateful for the outside counsel – and for being challenged along the way too!
For more about Cochlear, visit their website.
I hope you enjoyed reading Kirsten’s deeper dive into leading the rebrand of a healthcare icon. If you’d like to know more, ask a question or share a comment, please do – as ever, I’d love to hear from you.