Boeing, the Chicago-based aerospace giant, is known for its commercial aircraft. The 93-

year-old company is the no. 2 manufacturer in the world of such planes, behind Blagnac, France-based Airbus. But Boeing produces much more than just commercial jets. It also makes military aircraft, integrated defense systems, missiles, satellites and communications systems. It’s the no. 2 contractor for the Pentagon, second only to Lockheed Martin Corp. It works with NASA to help operate the space shuttle and International Space Station, and with the US Army as a systems integrator. Boeing employs more than 158,000 people in the United States and 70 other countries, has customers in more than 90 countries and is one of the United States’ largest exporters. In short, Boeing is a multifaceted B-to-B behemoth.

But while the Boeing brand might be familiar to the marketplace, until recently the company lacked a cohesive brand identity or communications strategy to unify its disparate enterprises. A few years ago, Boeing set out to integrate its various businesses into one company, one visual identity and one brand. And in early 2008, Boeing launched the One campaign, a comprehensive internal and external branding effort to drive a ‘one brand’ culture and unify how the company connects with the outside world.

Boeing execs understand that, regardless of its size, a company needs to present a cohesive identity to clearly define where the company stands within the marketplace and how it intends to serve its customers. In other words, every company needs to leverage the power of ‘One.’

‘One brand’

For a B-to-B brand whose power and legacy already resonate within the marketplace, a comprehensive brand overhaul, many years in the making, might seem unnecessary.
But ‘the choice for the company is a house of brands versus a branded house. Boeing chose the branded house.’
A strong, cohesive brand lends instant recognition to new products, positions a company well against competition and withstands any negative impacts within the marketplace.
And probably one of the most important [benefits of a unified brand] is internally, it makes us more cohesive.
Many years ago, Boeing’s visual identity was all over the map. Boeing grew over the years through a series of mergers and acquisitions, and although every business segment shared the Boeing label, each had its own marketing material, signage, color palette, you name it. There were more than 200 different styles of letterhead and business cards.
Over the years, Boeing execs have worked to create a cohesive communication style. And with the ‘current brand refresh,’ as company calls it, Boeing is taking hold of the aforementioned rope to tie the company’s visual dements, culture and outwardly facing brand together.

‘One look’

The aerospace industry’s as whole is becoming more sophisticated in how it approaches the marketplace. So in 2006 and 2007, Boeing conducted a series of audits of all communication materials to see how it was measuring up.
The company found that cohesion was sorely lacking, and marketing materials appeared dated and disjointed.
In early 2008, Boeing execs put together a cross-departmental, ‘super-unwieldy’ team of employees from communications, creative services, customer relations, marketing, sales, HR and other ‘internal organs’ to hash out what the Boeing brand’s visual identity should be.
They called in assistance from the company’s ad agency, Chicago-based Draftfcb; Seattle-based corporate design firm Methodologie Inc.; and Paul Haverly, an aviation design consultant. They all set out to cut through Boeing’s visual clutter, create a unified brand, reduce costs and drive efficiency by promoting consistent design principles.
The team researched the brand’s personality, promise and mission. Team members understood that to create an authentic sense of ‘oneness,’ they had to identify which characteristics Boeing’s many enterprises have in common.
The first phase of the process concluded with ‘the initial distillation of all of [the gathered information] into the brand DNA,’ says Dale Hart, Methodologie’s partner and creative director. The team came up with a triple helix; enterprising spirit, or why Boeing does what it does; precision performance, or how Boeing gets things done; and defining the future, or what Boeing achieves as a company.
Using that simply stated but carefully honed framework, the team created a design roadmap for the Boeing brand called the brand visualizer. Methodologie, which had experience building brand mapping systems for other clients, assembled the brand visualizer to guide all design decisions – creating a company color palette, pinpointing one company typeface, defining the company’s voice and communications style, and determining how photos and images should be used.
‘In a company the size of Boeing … they have many, many agencies articulating their brand, as well as many people on the staff articulating the brand,’ says Janet DeDonato, Methodologie’s founding partner and strategic director. ‘It had to be a really broad and encompassing system … It’s hard to figure out a system that will work for everybody.’
For example, one employee who worked with military customers said the design was trending toward a light, ephemeral typography that wouldn’t correctly convey who Boeing is to his customers. He said the company needed something with enough weight to suit both commercial and military enterprises. The team then spent five days doing type studies to find a font with some edge and eventually chose Helvetica, Newcomb says.
The resulting system is structured enough to keep everyone on the same page from a branding and design perspective, but flexible enough to accommodate products ‘from zero elevation up to 30,000 feet and beyond,’ Hart says.

Of course, it’s all well and good to create a comprehensive system like this, but the true test of a company’s success is employee buy-in. For that, the brand visualizer’s simplicity is key, says Sandy Kolkey, executive vice president and group management director at Draftfcb and manager of the Boeing account. ‘It’s like the difference between getting a 400-page PowerPoint deck and getting the executive summary. No one reads the 400-page deck.’

‘The main thing is getting people to understand the concept … That’s the hard part,’ Newcomb adds. Once employees understand the reason behind the branding strategy and design, they can implement the guidelines, tools and best practices correctly, he says. Employee training is underway and the company has held design and branding workshops. Every employee in the company has access to the brand map and to a company brand network online, whether or not his job description requires it, for one simple reason: ‘Everyone should be managing the brand.’

‘One company’

Over the past few years, Boeing has leveraged its brand’s silo-busting power wherever and however possible, extending that thickly threaded rope throughout the company to create a sense of camaraderie and shared purpose among the disparate enterprises.
Even before embarking on the brand refresh project, the company began working to bond its employees together through internal communications. A set of newsletters, for example, are sent out to managers and employees to keep them up to speed on the company’s daily goings-on. And the company has been working on a series of internal motivational videos featuring Boeing employees taking about their jobs and achievements.
‘In 2007, Boeing parlayed the internal motivational video effort into an external B-to-B-to-C advertising effort known as the ‘That’s Why We’re Here’ campaign.
Like the motivational videos, the ads feature real Boeing employees from a diverse range of business segments talking about what Boeing does and what the Boeing brand stands for.
The campaign has been a huge hit with Boeing employees, which has served to strengthen the ‘One company’ strategy. In a company survey, seven out of ten respondents said that the campaign ‘expresses the way I feel about Boeing’ and nine out of ten found the campaign appealing. ‘It was a 65% increase over the previous campaign.’

Prepare for Takeon

Richard Aboulafia, vice president of analysis at Teal Group Corp., a Fairfax, VA-based aerospace and defense industry research group, says Boeing has an ‘extremely strong’ brand, but he’s wary of giving an all-out endorsement for the external manifestations of the ‘One brand, One company’ strategy.
‘Is branding important? Sure. Is creating a unified company and making it look like you’re one company? Sure,’
he says. ‘On balance, I think it’s good’ to have a cohesive brand. But if Boeing’s brand is intrinsically unified, negative occurrences in one area of the company can reflect poorly on other areas as well. For example, issues that occur in the construction of Boeing’s much-anticipated and much-delayed 787 Dreamliner aircraft also could reflect poorly on Boeing’s military or information systems businesses, Aboulafia surmises.
The flipside of that coin is that a cohesive, well-executed brand can create more favorable perceptions of the company and can act as a buffer for the company’s image, says Richard Ford, executive creative director of the New York office of Landor Associates, a global branding firm.
‘It’s more about keeping stock prices high and about making sure that Boeing has some kind of halo around it … a positive impression of the brand that would protect the brand from damage, should it occur,’’ says Ford, an expert in aviation branding. ‘I think they’re on the right track, at least as far as the [brand] clean-up goes,’ he says. ‘But I think there’s a lot more for Boeing in the future and this is just the beginning.’

A global, multipronged business, Boeing is making strides in branding itself as one company versus a conglomerate of smaller businesses, banking on the power of internal branding and a cohesive marketing communications strategy to put it ahead of its competitors. And as mentioned earlier, when it comes to branding, a true measure of success is employee buy-in. If the Boeing brand rings true to the people who represent it, and those people want to take care in representing it well, then the brand is well-positioned to succeed.

Questions

1. Evaluate Boeing’s strategy for ‘Becoming One.’
2. Is the approach used by Boeing suitable for other companies, including B-to-C companies? Discuss.
3. What did Boeing’s team on brand identity come up with as the three elements they thought should be considered as making up ‘the company’s DNA?’ Do you agree with their list?
4. Why did Boeing go to three outside groups (ad agency, design firm, aviation design consultant) to assist in developing ‘one brand’?
5. In very brief summary, what methods did the company use to get people to understand the branding strategy?
6. Do you think that it is really possible for a brand to help create a sense of camaraderie and shared purpose among employees? Why or why not?
7. What has been the reaction of the employees to the program?
8. Discuss any potential downside to such broad and strong branding.