| The Agilent introduction illustrates one of the great commercial phenomena of the Innovation Economy ” the emergence of positioning and advertising as the builder of brand identity and value in the world market. Agilent Technologies, Inc. is a global technologies company headquartered in Palo Alto, California. With approximately 39,000 employees , Agilent operates in more than 120 countries with R&D and manufacturing in multiple locations worldwide. First listed on the New York Stock Exchange on November 18, 1999, Agilent's net revenue that year was $8.3 billion. Currently, over half of Agilent's net revenue is derived from outside of the U.S. [5] Since its spin-off from HP in March of 1999, Agilent has focused its business in four core areas: communication, electronics, healthcare, and life sciences. Establishing a New Brand with a Separate, yet Familiar Identity In the fall of 1999, Agilent, the non-computer systems spin-off from HP, launched their positioning statement, shown in Figure 2-4. Figure 2-4. Agilent's positioning statement. Source: Reprinted with permission of Agilent Technologies, Inc.  Defining the Problem One of Agilent's first challenges as a company had been finding a way to keep the history and strength of its parent company, HP, which is known for being a quality innovator, while creating a new and vibrant business. "Dreams Made Real" evolved from this initial focus and was shaped through a desire to be seen as a forward-looking company, innovating and positioned to grow in communications, electronics, healthcare, and life sciences. When Agilent was spun off from HP, the company gained a whole new focus, as seen below. The immediate challenge Agilent faced was how to build a corporate brand for an $8 billion "start-up" that was losing one of the most highly respected names in the business. The marketing effort was one of the most ambitious new brand introductions in history, with a $150 million budget spent in 27 countries and four major geographic regions . All 40,000 pages of the Agilent Web site rolled over to the new brand identity on the day of the launch. The criteria set for building this new brand positioning was quite daunting. The objectives included: -
Finding ways to create an emotional connection with multiple target audiences -
Differentiating Agilent from the competition -
Distinguishing Agilent from HP -
Creating a flexible brand image -
Implementing the new brand consistently throughout the world. [6] The positioning needed to communicate Agilent's core values of speed, agility, focus, accountability, and the ability to "create like a start-up and deliver like a Fortune 100 company." The following three ads from the continuing Agilent campaign illustrate how with simple visual and copy, the company has successfully positioned itself to meet these campaign objectives (see Figures 2-5 through 2-7). Figure 2-5. The Agilent campaign. Source: Reprinted with permission of Agilent Technologies, Inc.  Figure 2-6. The Agilent campaign. Source: Reprinted with permission of Agilent Technologies, Inc.  Figure 2-7. The Agilent campaign. Source: Reprinted with permission of Agilent Technologies, Inc.  Shirley Horn is the senior director of global brand management at Agilent. She managed the Agilent brand naming process and the marketing introduction of the brand simultaneously in 27 countries. Here is her insider perspective of the challenge of branding and marketing a worldwide technology company. We have summarized the lessons learned after each of her excerpted comments. Shirley Horn Setting the right objectives for communications We focused the objective on getting the name Agilent recognized and creating the simple knowledge that we compete in the communications and life sciences categories. It wasn't that critical in the early days for a broad audience to understand exactly what we did in life sciences. Now we have accomplished that. Agilent has the name recognition. Some of our people are champing at the bit to do the next wave. Many people want to do ingredient branding ” say, "Agilent Enabled" as Intel did with "Intel Inside" ” and get our corporate signature on everybody else's products and boxes. There's tremendous enthusiasm for building the power of this brand, but you've got to take it in the right steps. What use is building an "Agilent Enabled" type ingredient brand if you don't build the role that you play first? Lesson: Build awareness and recognition of the role you play in the technology field so people can understand the function and value you bring to the process. Just positioning the brand as having a role in the process may be useful if you introduce early in the category development (such as Cisco accomplished in positioning the brand as driving the Internet revolution in the "Are You Ready?" campaign in 1997 “2000). This method is less effective when the field is crowded with business enterprise enabling companies that all seem to provide business solutions without a clear difference in their area of expertise. Does technology really change the basic rules of positioning? Our positioning challenge at Agilent is to communicate what we do and to say it in broad enough terms that our role can be understood by nontechnical audiences and at the same time doesn't patronize the technical audiences. There is a dichotomy . Some technology companies feel compelled to explain everything about their engineering, so their audiences miss the point completely. Others are trying to get a message across that they are players in such major markets, like communications, that they don't explain enough about their role, and therefore they fall into the trap of sounding like everybody else. So the marketing challenge becomes: How do you bring the two together? Of course, the more direct your message is to your technical customer, the more specific you need to be about the technology. Lesson: Technology companies have to balance specificity of what they do with an interesting, but relevant way to present the product and the category. This combines communication about the product benefit with the intuitive emotional insight of people and their relationship to this category. The balance of being an American headquartered company, yet a global multilocation rnterprise The American card plays much better when you create the premise of how we partner with the countries and the communities that we're in. Going back to the very basic corporate positioning outside the U.S., the messaging is weighted more toward the global Fortune 100- sized company compared with the entrepreneurial start-up. So the unique positioning is, "creates like a start-up, delivers like a Fortune 100." In the U.S., the "create like a start-up" played much better during the first two years of our brand program, when all start-ups were hot. Outside the U.S., and now in the U.S. following the dot-com demise, we want to dial up the "global Fortune 100 world-class company." But even when you say Fortune 100, you automatically attach an American label. The way we handle it outside the U.S. is by a combination of all of our corporate functions: public relations, internal communications, university relations, philanthropy, and public affairs. We talk about the contribution of the company to the local economy. We speak about our R&D manufacturing facilities there. What are we contributing? How many jobs do we provide? We can't do this in every country because, of course, we can't put manufacturing and R&D in every country. But it tends to work where we do. We're getting 90% of our sales from the places where we have most of our employees and manufacturing and R&D facilities, or we have R&D and manufacturing facilities there because that's where our customers are. Lesson: Global companies can be perceived as good citizens if they utilize local managers and personnel, contribute to community life, and are perceived as part of the regional strength that enhances the quality of life and the economy. Be sensitive to what aspects of the company identity are most valued by the region. The demise of the dot-coms is a lesson in the basics Advertising has a role to play, but it is only a small part of the whole picture. During our launch phase, it helped to position Agilent as a powerful and professional contender in its market categories. It did an awful lot in terms of getting the employees excited and making them feel proud. It got the name out there, and got people familiar with the name. The advertising was the top of the duck swimming in the pond and everything else was paddling like hell underneath. Had we been a dot-com and spent $100 million on a brilliant campaign, but not brought in revenues , profits, or delivered on our promise, it would not have succeeded. Then we might have been featured on the most memorable ads on the Super Bowl (the most- viewed televised event each year in the U.S.) three years from now, but that's all we'd have to show for it, if, indeed, we were still in business. If you do not have substance behind your brand, or you can't deliver on your promise, brilliant advertising will not save you. While part of HP, the future Agilent business divisions had been delivering on market leadership, technology innovation, and world-class manufacturing and service and expertise for 60 years. We didn't lose any of that. What was risky from an advertising perspective was the promise of what would be different. What would change? What are the benefits of being a separate company that are relevant to the audiences? And that's where we came up with these attributes of speed, and focused commitment to these particular industries, being able to accelerate the revolution. Now that we're Agilent the shackles are off; we can move faster but have the same great, or even better levels of performance. Lesson: Focus on benefits that your target market can easily understand and value, and on benefits that you have confidence you can deliver. | Positioning in technology categories is complex. As these insights from Shirley Horn demonstrate , the challenge for a brand is to create an identity across many target audiences that not only describes the category of technology, but also the value of that branded company within the category. Positioning must be for market need and not merely for the product or service that is here today. Agilent is positioned as the toolmaker that enables researchers to "make dreams real." The challenge is to establish a world brand, not just be perceived as a Silicon Valley company. Marketing is the vehicle to accomplish this. Marketing and positioning will continue to play key roles as institutions such as technology parks, governments , universities, global businesses, and start-ups vie for the human and capital resources that drive the Innovation Economy. The lessons learned from Agilent, one of the most significant branding stories of the Innovation Economy, provide best practices direction in the challenging discipline of marketing. |
