Hillrom
A master brand rollup that gave customers more, not less.
The winning concept
A master brand rollup asks customers to give something up. The pitch-winning concept gave them more, instead.
40 → 5 → 1: agencies bidding, finalists presenting, one chosen.
Employment: frog, a Capgemini Invent company. Deliverables: master brand architecture · brand film · unified digital ecosystem · 120-day integrated campaign (paid, earned, owned).
Challenge
The concern beyond the brief
Rapid acquisitions had left Hillrom with fifteen established brands, a fragmented identity, and a market that still saw it as the hospital-bed manufacturer rather than a connected-care medical technology company. The brief asked for a campaign announcing the mergers and reestablishing the company as an industry leader.
What was in the brief wasn’t the challenge. A master brand rollup asks customers to give something up. Consolidation looks, from the outside, like subtraction. If Hillrom did this rollup badly, they’d lose accounts while announcing their ambition.
Solution
Breadth becomes the story.
I presented four concepts. The one Hillrom chose was the one that solved the subtraction problem: every acquisition stops being a brand being absorbed and becomes evidence for the claim. Claim presence everywhere care happens and the acquisitions are the verification.
I built the concept on Hillrom’s Batesville, Indiana heritage — relationships, connection, showing up, integrity — so the rollup read as reach rather than absorption. The campaign was built specialty by specialty, around the people each acquisition brought with it.
Three weeks after the win, we were in production on the brand film. In brand transitions, hesitation reads as doubt.
Result
Outcome
Fifteen acquired brands unified under one Hillrom master brand, with the market repositioned from bed-tech to connected-care med-tech under “Everywhere There Is Care, We Are There.”
Hillrom was acquired by Baxter and the brand retired within three years of this rollout.
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Each project shows how I make complex technology clear to the people who decide.
