Daimler Trucks & Buses

A year-long creative journey to uncover and articulate a shared purpose for one of the world’s largest mobility brands—aligning cultures, languages, and identities around a single idea that moved people inside and outside the company.

Unifying Purpose for a Global Family of Brands

This project was a year-long deep dive into brand purpose, creative strategy, and internal storytelling across Daimler’s constellation of global brands, including Mercedes passenger cars and Daimler Trucks & Buses.

It brought me from factory floors to strategy rooms, from test tracks to town halls; serving as creative director, facilitator, and sometimes translator across languages and cultures. It wasn’t just about marketing; it was about finding meaning that everyone could share.

Services

Brand Strategy: Brand Purpose, Investigation, Brand Pillars

Role: Creative Director.
Creative Team Leader, Brand Strategy, Creative Storytelling

Agency: BCG Brighthouse/Contractor

From assembly plants to boardrooms to the drivers

The challenge

Daimler’s portfolio spanned continents and cultures. Each brand had its own legacy, audience, and way of speaking. The challenge was to bring these voices together under a single purpose that felt authentic to all of them—something that could live inside corporate strategy but also resonate with engineers, drivers, and factory teams around the world.

How do you unify without erasing difference?
How do you find a purpose strong enough to hold a family of brands together, yet flexible enough to speak every language?

Defining A global brand Purpose

For All Who Keep
The World Moving

the work

I teamed with BCG and Daimler’s internal teams for a year long investigation and presentation process to lead a process that mixed listening, synthesis, and creative translation.

Hundreds of interviews and workshops across markets revealed shared values—innovation, pride, reliability, and motion. From those insights came a unifying purpose:

“For all who keep the world moving.”

It became a north star for storytelling, not a slogan to sell. A way to speak about technology, logistics, and human effort in the same breath.

It shaped internal brand films, recruitment campaigns, social storytelling, and creative content across divisions. A digital series explored how purpose moves through people; from C-suite leaders to artists and athletes—showing that motion is both mechanical and human.

Global Adoption

The purpose platform took on a life of its own.
Different markets translated and adapted it, finding cultural nuances that made it their own.
From Japan to Brazil, each regional brand interpreted “For all who keep the world moving” in its own visual and verbal language; campaigns, internal activations, and local storytelling that connected global alignment with local authenticity.
It became a shared creative framework that could flex, travel, and speak to everyone in their own words.

The outcome

The work gave Daimler’s global network a clear and human way to talk about itself—internally and externally.
It guided internal communications, inspired new social and recruiting content, and gave brand teams across continents a reason to align around something that felt real.

This wasn’t about launching a campaign. It was about helping thousands of people recognize that they were already part of one.

We start with listening.

Our customers, society and economies are constantly on the move, which is why we are continuously following them and adapting every solution to the current situation. In order to shape the future, we promote an environment in which we openly address errors and overcome them together. Challenges make each of us want to tackle them successfully. We are empowered and encouraged to make decisions by carefully weighing up opportunities and risks. If we do not feel safe in a situation, we seek expert advice. In particular, we are attentive to any conflicts of interest that may arise, we never tolerate corruption or fraud, and we enable fair competition.

We progress together.

A connected world thrives. If we combine our individual strengths and intelligence, we will achieve much more than we would alone. That’s why we actively lend each other a helping hand. We are convinced that the combination of the different characteristics of our employees – for example, with regard to gender, age, (cognitive) diversity, cultural background, and education level – will produce better results. We develop new technologies together. Our mutual progress also moves our customers forward. We are committed to respecting human rights and the rights of each individual. We have many brands within the Daimler Truck Group – and behind them all is a strong family that shares the same motivation: creating progress for our customers' benefit.

We build to solve.

Our customers, society and economies are constantly on the move, which is why we are continuously following them and adapting every solution to the current situation. In order to shape the future, we promote an environment in which we openly address errors and overcome them together. Challenges make each of us want to tackle them successfully. We are empowered and encouraged to make decisions by carefully weighing up opportunities and risks. If we do not feel safe in a situation, we seek expert advice. In particular, we are attentive to any conflicts of interest that may arise, we never tolerate corruption or fraud, and we enable fair competition.

We lead with the long view.

Since we have been at our customers' sides for many generations now, we can draw on a wealth of experience. We think decades ahead and work for future generations. We use our past learnings to enhance our future opportunity to fulfill our responsibility to the people, We are not striving for short-term success, environment and society in the best possible way. but for the right and sustainable solution. This is reflected in our daily behavior and decision- making. We develop innovations that enable safe, efficient, and reliable transport. Ultimately, our customers base their existence on our products and services. That’s why we see ourselves as a partner for their economic success – we advise and support them throughout the entire shared journey.

The Purpose Pillars

Out of all those conversations came a set of supporting pillars—values and themes that grounded the purpose in lived experience.
Each one expressed a different aspect of the idea: people, progress, and movement.
Together, they formed the foundation for how every brand and market could tell its story while staying part of something larger.

Once the purpose was clear, the work turned to expression—bringing it to life through design, language, and story.

It shaped internal brand films, recruitment campaigns, social storytelling, and creative content across divisions.

A digital series explored how purpose moves through people—from C-suite leaders to artists and athletes—showing that motion is both mechanical and human.