When Becton Dickinson, a $3 billion medical devices company, celebrated its centennial year in 1999, the company was in the midst of a cultural transformation. The leadership of the company recognized the need to communicate more effectively to customers and other audiences. Despite its success, the company was not well known to some key customer constituencies that were expected to have an increasing influence over purchase decisions. The company was also entering into new businesses where its strengths, future direction and philosophy were not understood.
“Our goal is to build on BD’s important market position to become widely known as the organization best known for eliminating unnecessary suffering and death from disease.”
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, BD
- Three different names–Becton Dickinson, Becton and BD–in use as well as two different logos
- The need to build consensus worldwide across all the company’s businesses
- Little understanding of the company’s relationship to its well-known brands
- Developed a new positioning statement and image goals
- Conducted name and nomenclature research with key audiences as critical input for the development the company’s new brand architecture
- Developed a master brand strategy with BD as the communicative name
- Created a new symbol, logotype and design system to signal a new direction and implemented a family look for all communications
- Created branding standards and decision tools to leverage the corporate brand as well as its well-known, highly regarded product brands
- Created a new tagline: “Indispensable to human health” to support the positioning