GE Healthcare, Storytelling, and COVID – How B2B Brands Can Adapt to Crises
Every company around the world responds differently when a crisis hits, and it can often present a significant challenge to serve customers during this time and continue marketing a business in the ways a brand normally would.
Of course, few peacetime challenges have been as significant or a globally encompassing as the COVID-19 crisis – and few businesses were as strongly impacted as those operating in the healthcare space. From healthcare providers operating on the frontline, to those brands working behind the scenes developing medical devices and treatments to better combat the SARS-COV-2 virus.
As the healthcare arm of one of the world’s biggest and most well-known brands, GE Healthcare has certainly been in the trenches of the COVID-19 crisis and has been developing its marketing to keep its messaging on point.
GE Healthcare
At the beginning of the COVID crisis, one of the most common stories being reported in the media was the global shortage of the PPE equipment frontline workers required to keep themselves safe while performing their roles.
Naturally, a great deal of attention regarding this topic fell onto brands operating in the healthcare space which were supposed to be producing this essential equipment – one of which was GE Healthcare. This led to GE Healthcare’s public relations teams fielding literally dozens of calls every single day wanting statements on why everything from PPE to essential medical devices such as ventilators were failing to be produced in large enough numbers to meet demand.
It was a powerful environment of uncertainty and fear as, at the time, COVID was a new threat and nobody quite new what the real scope of the problem was and whether we as a species were going to be able to handle it. GE Healthcare knew it had a responsibility to answer these questions and to reassure its audience that the issue was in hand and that the company was taking its responsibility seriously when it can to ramping up production of PPE and ventilators.
"GE Healthcare’s brand and digital marketing team, under the leadership of VP [of global bran and digital marketing], Kristin Fallon, saw all the negative news, yet the stories the company was experiencing first-hand, through their employees as well as their customers on the front lines, were often more hopeful," reports Forrester. "As global cases surged and the news cycle turned darker, GE built a small, agile team that rapidly mobilized to show a counter-narrative of courage, optimism, and innovation – values authentic to the brand."
Storytelling
In an effort to tell its stories the marketing team at GE Healthcare commissioned a series of videos designed to document the lengths GE employees and customers were going to in order to meet the challenges of the COVID-19 crisis.
The videos featured interviews with employees, healthcare experts such as doctors and nurses, other hospital workers, and stakeholders throughout the medical equipment supply chain. GE Healthcare wanted the authentic perspectives of these people, which was a risky prospect, and knew it couldn’t be seen to be scripting the interviews, or in any way not allowing the subjects to provide their true and informed views on the crisis.
"Each video was designed to be human-centered, informative, optimistic, purposeful, and candid. In total, GE Healthcare shot 42 videos in 42 days," continues Forrester. "Very little post-production was applied to the videos. The authenticity and rawness of the videos was intentional, helping to demonstrate the rapidly evolving situation, the challenging environment, and the real people addressing it."
And the campaign was a massive success. The campaign attracted nearly 800,000 views across the 42 videos and accounted for 80% of the total GE Healthcare video viewership for the prior 12 months. The six-week series gained GE Healthcare more than 30,000 new social media followers and garnered thousands of comments – some even going so far as to reach out and thank GE employees and the filmmaker personally for their hard work during the pandemic. The employees themselves reported a renewed feeling of support and pride for the business following the release of the film series.
Final Thoughts
The results from GE Healthcare’s video campaign speak for themselves and serve to demonstrate just how powerful the art of storytelling can be for a brand – especially during a crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
Brands are made up of people and it’s those people that make the difference in trying times such as these, dealing with their own fears and uncertainty, while continuing to work hard to make sure others are kept safe.
You can hear GE Healthcare’s Director of Brand Campaigns and Media, Michelle Sweetwood, and Global Head of Global Brand & Digital Marketing, Kristin Fallon, speak at B2B Online 2022, taking place in April at the Chicago Marriott Downtown, IL.
Download the agenda today for more information and insights.