Full Story | Overview

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With a market cap of $105 billion, Micron is one of America's first, most successful start-ups. And yet, when compared to other global technology leaders, Micron's brand was significantly undervalued.

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After being invited to attend a series of corporate marketing briefings at Micron's HQ in Boise, Idaho, we discovered that the brand's character and purpose had become lost amidst years of boring "ingredient" ads. 

We returned to San Francisco and threw out the all-things-to-all-people brief and abandoned trying to address every brand metric at once.

Instead, we focused on one of the CEO's key strategic imperatives: tackling the critical shortage of talent in the chip manufacturing supply chain. By re-thinking and simplifying the business problem, we were able to get very specific about the brand attributes we wanted to shift:

"Amongst a new generation of brand savvy STEM graduates, the semiconductor industry is perceived as being a stale and soulless manufacturer of a commodity."

Deloitte Global Semiconductor Outlook

Our partners at Micron's in-house Studio in Boise were intrigued, and they invited us on a tour of the Micron Technology Campus. It was there that we discovered a visually stunning wall listing tens of thousands of patents that Micron employees have earned. On close inspection, one engineers name popped-up again and again. Gurtej Sandhu had racked up more patents than Thomas Edison [1,335 and counting], and he had three things in common with the idealistic STEM graduates we were hoping to engage: His passion, conviction and tenacity were off the charts. 

Duly inspired, we engaged one of the most popular figures in modern science to sell our core unifying idea. Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson worked with us on the overarching narrative, recorded a series of short films, and kicked things off with a rallying cry to Micron's 43,000 employees. 

As a result of making STEM grads famous for their innate and unstoppable motivation to change the world, we've begun to rejuvenate Micron's image and reaffirm the company's position as a global technology leader. 

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• The campaign exceeded targets for recruiting new graduates over a two year period, whilst improving staff retention and boosting morale. 

• To-date, Micron has been placed on the Best Workplaces lists in China, Germany, Italy, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan and USA. 

• The exploration & discovery theme of our campaign led to the development of ‘Micron Insight’; the company’s first ever annual event aimed at uniting the entire semiconductor eco-system around R&D. 

Source: Fortune magazine and Great Place to Work®

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