THE COMPANY

For 140 years, GE has been best known as an industrial giant. But in today’s world, GE is striving to become a nimbler, digitally driven company fueled by the Industrial Internet of Things.

THE SITUATION

Predix represented an opportunity for GE to break from the past and develop serious credentials in software—something GE has not been known for. To capitalize on this, GE created Predix, a new operating system for Industry.

THE CHALLENGE

GE hired Liquid to build a brand for Predix that would act both as a stand-alone brand, as well as provide much needed digital equity for GE’s evolution as both a brand and a business.

WHAT WE DID
  • Qualitative research
  • Swarms
  • Brand strategy
  • Portfolio architecture and nomenclature
  • Messaging
  • Brand identity design
  • Employee experience design
  • Industrial design
predix brand strategy design chart mob
THE DISCOVERY

We did qualitative interviews with Predix customers and prospects across multiple segments. We performed audits of GE’s brand, competitors and industry. We conducted 25-plus hours of interviews, visited multiple GE locations and ran a series of workshops in Silicon Valley and New York City.

As industrial companies are facing radical transformation, GE is in the midst of its own transformation by creating a whole new category: Digital Industrial. GE’s intention was to use the Predix platform to serve its own customers through its tier 1 businesses such as aviation, power, renewable energy and oil and gas. But is also planned to make Predix available for anyone to use—including their partners and even competitors.

This created challenges in that if Predix was too closely aligned with the GE brand, it could be a turn off for the broader industry, but if Predix was not attributed back to GE in any way, then GE would not benefit from the equity Predix could provide back to GE in terms of digital credibility. And, GE had been famous for being a branded house.

predix brand strategy design chart MOB
THE COLLABORATION

With GE stakeholders, Liquid facilitated several Swarms—our method for co-creating and collaborating with clients in real time—at GE’s Design Center in Silicon Valley as well as at its offices in New York City. Together, we established the brand strategy for Predix, including how Predix should best be endorsed by GE. We also identified and built the customer Tribe for Predix—the Builders of modern industry. Additional sessions were focused on developing a portfolio architecture for Predix products, offerings and events as well as a detailed messaging playbook.

THE UNVEILING

In August 2016, we helped GE unveil Predix at its first ever user conference, Predix Transform, in Las Vegas. Here, we introduced the new Predix story and brand identity to set the stage for an engaging few days with the brand’s new Tribe. We even created a physical manifestation of Predix via an enterprise server that crunches live data sent from machines like jet engines, steam turbines and entire energy plants to predict their operational future, including breakdowns. This design was done via a collaboration with Whipsaw, our industrial design partner here in San Jose.

SWARMING WITH LIQUID

A Swarm is when your key people and our key people get together in a room and co-create solutions in real time. This gets assignments off to an aggressive start, aligns our thinking and priorities, shrinks timelines, and leads us to strategic places we might never get to if we followed a more traditional path.

SEE THE LIQUID SWARM APPROACH