Branding and Trade Show

Danaher & Beckman Coulter Life Sciences | SLAS 2024 Trade Show

🤔BACKGROUND
Danaher is a $25B public company with 15 operating companies. Historically, Danaher was known mainly through its 15 operating companies, making the corporate brand relatively obscure outside investor circles. In October 2023, Danaher launched a brand strategy to position itself as a global science and technology leader using the “Innovation at the Speed of Life” tagline and a new visual identity.

As an employee of the Beckman Coulter Life Sciences (BECLS) opco, I honorably selected to lead the first ever brand consolidation effort for Danaher to unveil the brand at the Society of Laboratory and Screening (SLAS) 2024 trade show. The mission was to create a large Danaher booth that would include not only the BECLS opco, but also SCIEX, Molecular Devices, IDBS, Aldevron, and more. Additionally, the focus was directed at cross opco workflows, not individual company products and services. This was a massive undertaking with only four months before the Jan 2024 show date.

🥅OBJECTIVES
• Introduce the new Danaher brand identity.
• Demonstrate integrated workflows across Beckman Coulter Life Sciences (BECLS), Molecular Devices (MolDev), SCIEX, and IDBS.
• Highlight innovations such as CellXpress.ai and Echo MS+.
• Create a customer-centric booth experience showcasing real-world applications in high-throughput screening, organoid/3D biology, HT plasmid generation, and clone screening/cell line development.

💡STRATEGY
Designed a 30x40 booth with interactive kiosks, workflow stations, and an 'Apple Store' style experience. Featured cross-opco integrations with instruments like Biomek i7, Echo liquid handlers, BioAssemblyBot, and SCIEX ZenoTOF 7600. Delivered eye-catching data claims and digital collateral for customer engagement. Organized a Customer Appreciation Event for over 400 customers.

🏆RESULTS
• Customer feedback was extremely positive—customers appreciated the integrated workflow story and nonstop engagement at the booth.
• Strong visibility for Danaher, though feedback indicated a need for clearer opco branding to reduce confusion.
• Final show budget reached $1.07M driven by booth design and branding investments. The $1M show expense generated over $25M in funnel and $11M in wins within 12 months.
• Positioned Danaher as offering the largest portfolio of technologies and workflow solutions, unlike competitors’ point-to-point offerings.

👩MY ROLE
As the Danaher project leader, I coordinated three large cross-functional and cross-opco teams: technology, marketing and operations, hosting six meetings per week to plan and execute this large-scale project. In addition, I created sales training for BECLS salespeople and a new lead scanning software application to identify and parse leads by opco. In all, this project involved over 500 people. For this project, I won the highest BECLS award for excellence.