CASE STUDY
Positioning Saint-Gobain in North America
“You want to be where everybody knows your name” — Gary Portnoy
What’s in a name?
With a multi-billion dollar portfolio and a complex mix of brands, Saint-Gobain was seeking to increase their name recognition in North America, improve their digital communications channels and position themselves as an employer of choice. We helped them address internal organizational challenges that were complicating their efforts, realign their online marketing and communications, launch a new website, and provide more compelling career information.
North America
Industry: Construction and high-performance materials
Location: Malvern, PA
Global: Courbevoie, France
179,000+ employees, $47.5 billion in sales
North America: Malvern, PA, USA
15,000+ employees, $6.2 billion in sales
Website: www.saint-gobain-northamerica.com
Company Bio
The world’s largest building materials company and the global leader in sustainable habitat. Their materials and products are used to create and improve the places we interact with every day of our lives. Saint-Gobian is focused on developing and delivering the innovative solutions that help professionals and communities improve the quality of human life.
The Challenge
Originating in France and officially entering the American market in 1967, Saint-Gobain has enjoyed more than 350 years of growth through strategic mergers and acquisitions. In North America, a widening gap was developing in name recognition between the parent company and its many specialized and highly technical brands. Lack of adequate tools for describing the interrelationships between business units frustrated efforts to promote the company’s breadth and expertise to customers, employees and job seekers. The state of the corporate website and social media channels reflected these organizational challenges and required a complete overhaul.
The Approach
We conducted extensive market and user research to develop and validate new brand positioning. A comprehensive audit of digital properties revealed discontinuities in the relationships between business units and wide variations in the use of terms describing the business structure. Based on this audit, we developed a common vocabulary and standard taxonomies to describe the organizational elements and their relationships. This standardization enabled us to create an abstraction model of the company’s structure and design a robust architecture.
The Solution
Using our abstraction model, we classified each business unit, their products and services, and their target markets in a design structure matrix (DSM). Business stakeholders from the management and communications teams were added to the matrix. The relationships between entries were recorded and clustered to reveal affinities between these elements. We achieved a single view of the organizational structure and mapped clear lines of authority for updates and approvals. We specified the final website based on these findings. Defining clear content governance allowed us to manage collaboration across 50+ business units to completely rewrite the web content in about 4 weeks. The client gained additional value from our work when the global parent adopted our approach and modified it where necessary to fit the context of European and regional markets.
If North America, why not Mars?
Establishing and designing with brand and marketing guidelines is one thing; training a diverse collection of teams distributed around the globe to use them is another. At the brand training summit, we challenged Saint-Gobain’s team members to imagine they were partnering with NASA to build the first human habitats on Mars. Teams were randomly assigned marketing challenges related to this scenario, provided with a media kit and design assets, and given two hours to prepare their solution in compliance with the new guidelines. Each team presented their solution to a panel of marketing industry experts and joined in a friendly critique of the results. Attendees gained practical experience, were safely nudged out of their comfort zones and had fun working.
Mars was chosen as an out-of-this-world but not unrealistic topic for the challenge. Saint-Gobain is already there! Numerous Saint-Gobain products were included in the Curiosity rover and its delivery vehicle.