Building our Brand Essence

By now, every Cook Medical employee reading this should at least be aware of Cook’s new brand essence, “Relentlessly Inventive, Deeply Connected.” Originally unveiled at the employee town hall in September 2022 as part of a package that included Cook’s new company vision strategy, and mid-range master plan (MRMP), the brand essence is meant to provide a focus for employees as they go about their daily work.

Those four words were not arrived at lightly. They, along with the vision strategy and MRMP, were the output of a two-year effort that started with a brand perception study at the end of 2020 that surveyed Cook customers. The results of that study confirmed what many inside Cook had begun to sense—that Cook was no longer seen as the innovative company it had been for much of its 60-year history.

Below, Brian Arnold, senior director of Global Brand Strategy for Cook, talks about the how and the why behind “Relentlessly Inventive, Deeply Connected” and what those words mean for Cook going forward.

When you first started presenting the brand perception study to people at Cook was the response surprise or was it confirming what people were feeling?

I think it confirmed what a lot of people thought, but seeing how stark it was—that we’re seen as a traditional, undifferentiated company—I don’t know that anyone would word it that way. I think most of them thought that we just weren’t as innovative as we used to be.

The number one driver of brand preference across the globe in our industry is product innovation. Some people think of innovation as the mad scientists coming up with something completely new. And I think many people at Cook think of innovation as purely disruptive stuff—and we did a lot of that historically. But a lot of the best, most innovative companies are just really good at continually updating their core products—just making them better. We all use iPhones right? Apple—is there anyone better? They’re fine tuning their operating systems, their hardware, their ecosystem supporting the iPhone. It’s like clockwork. People expect it from them.

How did you go from presenting on the brand perception study to forming a work group to develop the brand essence, vision, etc.?

Christa Curtis (vice president, Global Marketing and Communications), Pete, and I sat down and one of the problems that he wanted to solve was bringing the different parts of the company together. I said that I had an idea for doing this and we asked if he wanted to be part of working out the details or assess the recommendations at the end of the process. Pete wanted to get into the details and asked that we assemble a work group that included Mark Breedlove (senior vice president, Vascular division), DJ Sirota (senior vice president, MedSurg division), Ross Harvey (vice president, Global Supply Chain), Caitlin Davis (director, Global Corporate Communications), and Derek Voskuil (senior vice president and chief operating officer for Cook Medical), Dave Breedlove (senior vice president and chief information officer) as well as Christa, Brand team members Jeremy Lowe, Clare Ellis, and Laura Gordon, and Kyle Caird (art director). That was in late October 2021.

Then we started the strategic exercise that ultimately led to this whole framework—the strategy, the vision, and the mid-range plan, which is what connected annual business planning to the vision.

You could argue that this working group was an example of living the brand essence even though that concept had not been totally fleshed out yet. To bring this sort of group together was a new approach for Cook.

The vision is aspirational, and most people tend to struggle with aspirations because they’re not concrete enough. That’s when why we leaned toward a concept like the brand essence. A lot of companies have used it very successfully. To me, it works as a real-time reminder of the vision. But it’s got to have enough teeth to it to be practical—it’s an internal guide for making strategic decisions that support our vision.

How did you decide on the specific words “Relentlessly Inventive, Deeply Connected”?

Everyone agreed that the first step to being seen as innovative is to be a reliable product supplier. Then on the other end we put something aspirational: product leadership. We want to be known for our products again above all else.

The first couple of meetings focused on developing the mid-range plan concept, and then we moved into the vision and finally the brand essence.

We did different versions of the brand essence and looked at examples from other companies. Nike’s brand essence ended up being the model we followed more than any other—”Authentic athletic performance.” You can quickly see how it can help make strategic decisions.

At first, we went with “Relentlessly Curious, Deeply Connected.” “Deeply Connected” was always there. The minute we mentioned “deeply connected,” you could see people leaning into it. Then no matter where I went, I would mention it and people would stop and listen. So that was a no-brainer—”connected” was going to be in it somehow, some way.

The other side was a little more “innovative” versus “inventive.” Innovative is over-used, and inventive felt closer to the spirit of what the leaders wanted and what Cook did in the early days. It’s a mindset anyone could adopt. People felt like the original draft of the vision leaned a little bit more to customer intimacy than product leadership, so we fine-tuned the vision to make it really clear that product leadership was the focus. We got a lot of feedback and that’s when we came back and tweaked the brand essence and how we then landed on “Relentlessly Inventive, Deeply Connected.”

How much were Cook Medical mission statement and the Cook values taken into consideration as you worked on the brand essence, and how did the three of them sit together in your mind?

We put them all together. We also looked to the Cook Group purpose statement for guidance (“We are a family of ethical and entrepreneurial companies that exists to empower people and communities to reach their full potential”) which the same group that worked on the mission and the values had worked on. We lined them up to make sure that they were consistent and aligned. We actually created a Cook Medical purpose statement (“We are a family-owned company that believes it’s possible to do good business and do good. We exist to empower customers, patients, employees and our communities to reach their full potential”), and it acted as the anchor for the other directional statements.

Ideally, what should Cook employees be doing on a day-to-day basis with the brand essence?

I think regardless of where you’re at and what you do in Cook, it’s applicable to everyone. I still hear people saying they tend to think it’s only for select groups of people in the company, like R&D or customer-facing teams. I think it can help in any area. It could begin with internal questions—just challenging yourself to maybe do things differently.

It’s like with coaching; a lot of that is you don’t want people to fall into patterns and ruts. The coach’s responsibility is to try to disrupt that. So, I think the brand essence is a great coaching or leadership tool to do that from the leader to the employee. I can hear or envision our teams using the brand essence on almost a daily basis to help make decisions and challenge ourselves when things are hard.

And I think for the individual employee that wants to be a part of the cause, it can act as a mantra. But it can also act as a filter or lens for making decisions—”Am I looking at this objectively or am I just following in the patterns of this is what we’ve always done? Am I striving for deeper connection or am I striving to just get this done?” I just think it has a lot of practicality.

We are at the beginning of an important journey for Cook and the brand essence is your invitation to get involved.

Do you have any final thoughts?

Yes, I just wanted remind people that the brand essence contains four words that are inseparable. As we go about our day, we can ask ourselves, “Are we connected to customers and each other well enough to understand critical unmet needs?” And, “From this deeper understanding, how can we take our resources and adjust or create something that meets that need better than before?”

If you have any questions about the brand essence or want to share stories of how it’s being lived in your area, please reach out to Brand@CookMedical.com.