Danaher Dental Brands - Unifying a Global Portfolio
Starting in the early 2000s, Danaher set about to create one of the largest, most comprehensive dental portfolios in the world. Through continuous acquisition, they brought together dozens of brands across regions, product categories, and customer segments. Many of which with a global presence. Their model for brand governance was to follow the “house of brands approach”, keeping existing brands intact while they applied DBS processes internally.
The challenge. Too big too fast.
By 2012, the dental portfolio had grown so large that it no longer made strategic sense to maintain so many overlapping parent brands. Customers were getting confused as to who still had what to offer, and began taking their business elsewhere. The salesforce needed a simple brand story to tell in order to earn back some long time customers who no longer trusted that their most valued products were still a priority for the now mega corp.
The solution. Project 2020.
Project 2020 was the guiding vision through which leadership was tasked with finding a way to get the 2 billion dollar portfolio of 20 parent brands, merged down to just 5… in under 5 years. The final 5 needed to be able to support massive imaging machines down to the smallest of drill bits. No small task for any organization.
Below is a brief 10,000-foot view of my role as lead creative for this ambitious endeavor.
In our first Project 2020 kick off meeting, this was presented to key players as our “current state”. For some in the room, it was the first time they had seen just how many brands were now part of the family.
My teams first task was to get the consumables house in order with a massive multi-year rebranding effort. Every restorative group got a full facelift: new guidelines, websites, trade show, social etc. Working in tandem with the German team, they took on a similar effort for the imaging brands. Namely the second biggest brand in the house, KaVo.
The decision was made at the Danaher Executive level to formalize what for years was an “internal only” name. The KaVo Kerr Group would be shortened to KaVo Kerr and be the new parent company that all the sales teams would sell under. The exceptions were Nobel Biocare, Ormco and Metrex, which operated in the lab, hygiene and ortho space. They were left stand alone. Of note, the decision to keep the logos intact and combine them was a Danaher level mandate.
After all the business units were aligned, it was time for a brand transition timeline. This was the projected path for every brand in the portfolio.
Once signed off on, the full rebrand began. Partnering with the German team, we came up with multiple brand guidelines. This was effectively the first time anyone had ever tried to sell such a diverse portfolio of brands from legacy parent companies under one umbrella in this space.
While not specifically asked for, I pitched the creation of a series of communication decks that were short form, easy to understand instructions for working with the new team. The marketing and creative team had tripled in a short amount of time, so solidifying process was paramount to making this brave new venture work without agency intervention. (And yes they were sold in and implemented immediately).
In tandem with process documentation, using the Kaizen process, I created a brief that had sign off from all the new stakeholders. What once was nebulous and fragmented, became one solid framework for getting the top tier campaign initiatives submitted and set up for success. It worked so well I created two more for daily work.
Building on the success of the brief input, I created another deck for the marketers that was a quick 6 page crash course on what creative wins looked like in our B2B world.
While most Creative Directors shy away from showing such low level work like a promo sheet for their brands, this one is different. It proved that the Project 2020 vision worked. We could now effectively put any of our 1000 sub brands onto one sheet or web promo and a sales person could hand this to a doctor and not have to explain our brand. It’s right there, clear as day, one unified portfolio built to make their lives easier.
One of the last campaigns I concepted and directed for the KaVo Kerr Brand was this moving series where 7 real people received life changing dental procedures using only KaVo Kerr products. It was paired with a custom curated box from each doctor and we had so many requests we had to put that portion of the campaign on hold. Andie’s story however was powerful enough to be told again and again after Danaher spun off the dental brands as Enivista in 2021.