How SeedGrowth puts its product brands in the limelight

Once, there was Bayer SeedGrowth. Now, there is SeedGrowth: a product team identifier in crop protection, but not a brand in its own right. If something stops being a brand, how can that make it stronger? SeedGrowth shows how: by putting the focus on its product brands, supporting them with continuity and coherence, and giving a platform to talk from. Three years later, the SeedGrowth business is going from strength to strength.

The Bayer brand architecture tells us where to put the focus from a branding perspective. The roof is the Bayer brand: our most valuable intangible asset. It stands for trust, reliability and quality. The foundation of our business are the product brands, where our customer impact and recognition lie. And that’s it. Crucially, brands are not found anywhere else in the architecture.

Who says that if it isn’t a brand, it can’t be fun? The new SeedGrowth video got colleagues and customers excited

SeedGrowth is our crop protection product team for seed treatments. Many of our seed treatment solutions – such as Gaucho, Buteo Start and Acceleron – are already powerful and respected brands in their own right. But in the past, SeedGrowth was also itself a standalone brand, displayed on communication materials along with the Bayer cross.

That changed in 2020, when work began to reposition the SeedGrowth offering and focus more on individual product brands to bring it line with overall Bayer brand architecture and to strengthen both the SeedGrowth and the Bayer brand equally.

Bayer SeedGrowth became SeedGrowth – a business identifier but not something that gets the ‘full brand treatment’. But that’s not the whole story. Because the SeedGrowth team didn’t see this as something being taken away – they saw a chance to add a lot more freedom under the roof of the Bayer brand. To give the important product brands an even firmer support base and enable their success. And so, SeedGrowth was reborn, with a whole new creative concept.

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Why we love it:

• SeedGrowth lives on! It now stands for a business, a team of colleagues, a solution provider and a level of expertise

• It’s been brought into the Bayer fold and can leverage the strength of the Bayer brand while being consistent with our global look and feel

• Seed treatment product brands (e.g. Gaucho, EverGol, Redigo, Buteo Start) have enormous potential – and now they can take center stage

• Colleagues were actively engaged and supported with new materials and a SeedGrowth community

What happened behind the scenes?

This was not just a case of ‘delete the word Bayer at the start of the name and avoid the impression of a non-existent legal entity’. SeedGrowth received a full set of new materials, designed from the ground up, to ensure everyone had the assets they needed to communicate the new-look business properly – and not just that, but to understand why the change was made.

At the center of this effort was the new SeedGrowth playbook, which delivered the rationale and guidelines for the switch. This covered the name and logos, but it went deeper too. Since references to SeedGrowth can happen in everyday conversations, it also covered ways of talking and referring to the business – getting people comfortable with saying e.g. “SeedGrowth by Bayer”. In a new storyline, it also offered a reminder of the strengths of SeedGrowth: its innovative solutions, experience and insight, long-term consistency, and of course, its people.

A new ‘badge’ logotype, website, advertisement formats, icons, infographics, and a SeedGrowth animation added to the package. And all this was designed as a ‘living resource’ rather than a finished product, with new assets being added and shared via a dedicated Teams channel.

This kind of reinvention isn’t quick. It was in progress until 2022. But the results are clearly visible now. 

Why SeedGrowth’s future looks stronger than ever

The change to SeedGrowth worked because of the bold, creative approach behind it. The process was driven by an understanding that this was an opportunity to add something more and to help SeedGrowth put its market-leading products at the center of its communications, in connection with the Bayer logo and therefore benefiting more from the brand uplift associated with the Bayer brand.

And that’s doubly important, because seed treatments are growing in importance for Bayer and for agriculture. They are part of the goal to reduce agriculture’s environmental impact, at the same time as being a growth area for the business.

Giving colleagues a new platform to talk about SeedGrowth means they can do more to advance it along its sustainable and successful journey. When they do so, they use not just the power of the SeedGrowth product team, but the global Bayer brand and product brands too.

SeedGrowth by Bayer. It never sounded so good! 

What they say about SeedGrowth