Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE):
Defining "What's Next" for a B2B Giant
The Challenge: Navigating an Enterprise Identity Crisis.
When Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) separated from the consumer hardware legacy of HP, the newly minted B2B tech titan faced an existential brand architecture challenge. Despite its massive market share and enterprise footprint, the company possessed zero independent corporate positioning. In the minds of both the public and prospective top-tier industry talent, the brand remained culturally anchored to the legacy printer and monitor businesses left behind with HP.
As the West Coast Creative Lead at Symphony Talent, my mandate was to architect a comprehensive corporate and employer narrative from the ground up—distancing HPE from its consumer legacy and positioning it as a definitive, frontier force in enterprise computing.
The Strategy: Converting Horizon-Tech into Human Aspiration
We recognized that a post-spin-off brand couldn't afford to look back; it needed to ruthlessly own the horizon. We proposed a high-level narrative platform designed to transform corporate uncertainty into a shared cultural movement: "What's Next?"
Instead of relying on conventional, transactional recruitment marketing, we engineered a sophisticated, editorial communication system built on a foundation of data, insights, and forecasts pulled directly from HPE’s C-suite and corporate leadership.
We used these executive visions to craft powerful, forward-looking human narratives. The resulting framework acted as an aspirational springboard, allowing elite tech candidates to see past product marketing, envision themselves at the absolute vanguard of emerging technology, and leverage HPE’s massive global momentum to accelerate their own careers.
The work my team and I produced was so well received, that we were asked to help create companion campaigns to onboard new hires and drive employee referrals.
In response, we developed a theme and reward that would be attractive globally to the entire employee population: Leveraging the excitement around the Formula E creative, we leveraged the exciting events and dramatic locations to entice a global workforce with a chance to win a trip and VIP access to one of the race sites. Through a custom interface, we gamified employee referrals to build excitement and engagement around What’s Next and the role they could play in driving future innovation.
The Activation: Engineering a Gamified Global Ecosystem
The "What's Next?" platform resonated so profoundly with corporate leadership that our brief was immediately expanded. We were tasked with scaling the narrative globally into a comprehensive new-hire onboarding infrastructure and an omni-channel employee referral campaign.
To ignite organic, word-of-mouth advocacy across a massive, disparate global workforce, we leveraged one of HPE’s most premium corporate assets: their high-profile sponsorship of Formula E racing.
Strategic Execution: We engineered a fully custom, gamified digital and mobile ecosystem that transformed standard corporate HR utility into a highly active, competitive habit loop.
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The Interface: We designed a sleek, modular mobile dashboard tracking real-time user engagement, social shares, and candidate pipeline conversions.
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The Habit Loop: Workforce participation was gamified through point accumulations and competitive global leaderboards.
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The High-Stakes Reward: To ensure international appeal across diverse cultural regions, we tied top performance to tier-one experiential rewards—offering employees a chance to win all-expenses-paid VIP access to dramatic Formula E race sites worldwide, including Monaco, Berlin, and Buenos Aires.
The Impact
By deploying immersive, high-visibility digital video environments across corporate headquarters alongside a localized mobile referral platform, we successfully re-engineered HPE’s cultural footprint. We proved that a legacy tech giant could pivot seamlessly into the future, transforming a complex corporate spin-off into an energetic, highly unified global workforce and a powerful engine for top-tier talent acquisition.