Micron

Doubling down on Idaho chips

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French Fry Tycoon J.R. Simplot breaks ground at Micron's first manufacturing plant in Boise, Idaho.

Backed early by a potato farmer’s fortune, Micron grew from a dental-office basement in 1978 into a global semiconductor powerhouse. Today, it is the only major U.S.-based manufacturer of computer memory, producing the advanced chips essential to modern computing and AI.

Yet an Interbrand study found that Micron’s brand was significantly undervalued relative to its technology-sector peers. When Sanjay Mehrotra became CEO, we were tasked with diagnosing the problem and developing a brand strategy to help break the violent, cyclical "boom-and-bust" pricing of the memory market.

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The semiconductor industry is perceived as being stale and soulless.

Instead of trying to address every metric at once, we focused on a critical business barrier: the severe and growing technical talent shortage across the U.S. chip sector.

While reports from BCG and McKinsey mapped the staggering numbers of the talent shortage, our primary research—speaking directly with students, educators, and workforce development agencies—revealed the human reality the data couldn’t capture, and the roots of Micron’s image deficit"

"The semiconductor industry is perceived as a stale, soulless manufacturer of a commodity."

On the ground, I skipped the dreaded focus groups—where employees routinely mask their real feelings behind compliance. Armed with nearly two decades of semiconductor expertise across Applied Materials, Marvell, ARM, and KLA, I chose an unvarnished approach and went deep on an informal factory tour. Later, when I took to the streets of Boise, I was stunned to find that even in Micron's home territory, the general public knew almost nothing about the largest for-profit employer headquartered in the state. The brand's deep human value was invisible.

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Gurtej Sandhu has racked up more US patents than Thomas Edison.

It was during the factory tour that our solution began to take shape. I was shown a visually stunning wall listing thousands of patents, and on close inspection, one name popped up again and again: Gurtej Sandhu—an engineer who has racked up more U.S. patents than Thomas Edison.

Curious about the man behind the name, we sat down together.

I discovered that his sheer grit and tenacity perfectly embodied the maverick values on which Micron was built. While semiconductor boardrooms had ignored public opinion for decades, in him I saw something bigger. The engineers and technicians deep down ached for their work to be famous. They wanted the world to see that an American company which had survived near-bankruptcy, and the tragic plane crash loss of a maverick CEO, was quite literally the backbone of the digital age. A national treasure.

Working directly with Micron’s talented in-house studio helped bypass the corporate PR noise and bring the brand's heart and soul to life. We then pulled off a media coup by persuading astrophysicist, author, and famous science communicator Neil deGrasse Tyson to co-edit scripts and voice two short films to rally 36,000 employees at Sanjay's first all-hands meeting.

With the internal culture re-ignited, we scaled the narrative across Micron’s entire global footprint. We transformed the creative materials from our work with Neil deGrasse Tyson into an international recruitment campaign and permanent internal branding ecosystem—installing high-impact visuals and videos across manufacturing plants, corporate offices, and fabs worldwide to reshape perception across the workforce and visiting stakeholders.

To bridge this internal pride into a dominant external market position, our brand strategy proposed Micron Insight — the company’s flagship annual tech summit— and we helped shape it into reality.

Performance: In fiscal Q3 2026, Micron converted an unprecedented AI-driven memory shortage into $41.5 billion in quarterly revenue and an 84.9% non-GAAP gross margin — a level typically reserved for software companies — decisively closing the systemic valuation gap with its tech-sector peers.
Fame: The campaign supported Micron’s trajectory from 36,000 employees at launch to over 55,000 today, culminating in its surge from No. 52 to No. 3 on Forbes’ America’s Best Employers For Tech Workers list — ranking just behind Microsoft and Google.
Market Value: The multi-year transformation of Micron’s brand equity provided the cultural foundation as the CHIPS Act took shape. This established trust helped secure billions in federal awards, ultimately aligning Micron’s commitment to a $250 billion domestic manufacturing footprint.