CASE STUDY
BOE
Defining a purpose-driven technology brand with a revigorated identity
Challenge
With nearly three decades of rapid development, leading IoT technology company BOE has become one of the world’s largest semiconductor display providers, producing more than a quarter of the world’s digital screens.
Though BOE has built a strong brand reputation over the years, its new corporate strategy prompted the organization’s imminent need to upgrade its master brand strategy. BOE came to Prophet with two key objectives: First, to extend its brand perception from a “business-oriented” company to a “consumer-oriented” one by creating a clear and consistent image as an IoT technology leader; and second, to define a new brand architecture that fuels the growth of its diversified business portfolio.
Solutions
Since 2017, Prophet has been BOE’s long-term strategic partner, supporting the business’s and brand’s continuous growth. Through this relationship, BOE entrusted Prophet with elevating BOE group’s master brand.
Our team first carried out in-depth interviews with both internal and external stakeholders – from executives and employees to customers and ecosystem partners. Combining insights with learnings from the benchmark study of leading global technology brands, we identified the core elements that BOE brand needed to retain and build. We then held multiple co-creation workshops with BOE’s core teams and executives to hone in on its brand mission for future growth. As a result, we defined the brand mission to “Change life with heart”, presenting people with a technology brand that’s warm, human and aspirational.
Anchoring on this core mission, we also clarified BOE’s brand promise and principles. This allowed the client to ensure that its mission was brought to life both in terms of external communication and engagement and internal behavioral codes and actions.
Our work didn’t end there. We teamed closely with the BOE team to define its brand architecture, a crucial component of a successful brand strategy. The refined brand architecture set the foundation for BOE’s transformation from a single, master brand-led approach to a hybrid architecture powered by master brand and key sub-brands. The new brand architecture better supports the organization’s growth vision across business areas. We then created a comprehensive decision framework to help evaluate where BOE needs to build sub-brands across business, technology and product levels.
Results
In late 2021, BOE officially unveiled its new brand positioning. Soon after BOE launched its first sub-brand – display technology ingredient brand. With the elevated brand positioning and architecture, BOE continues to accelerate building a connected and symbiotic IoT innovation ecosystem to empower the growth of upstream suppliers as well as the digital transformation of lower-stream partners. Working closely with a network of global partners, BOE strives to push forward a new round of technological disruption to unlock uncommon growth.
“We partnered closely with Prophet to drive the upgrade of BOE group’s master brand. With strong diligence and dedication, Prophet demonstrated deep insights into the technology industry and a true understanding of our business. It helped us successfully overcome the roadblocks of rebranding amid a business transformation, elevating our existing brand strategy in a clear and concise manner. All these endeavors were highly effective in repositioning BOE as an IoT company with a refreshed identity system.”
Da Si
Vice President and Chief Brand Officer, BOE