Indorama Ventures

Helping a global chemical company position its brand for the present and future.

What we did

The challenge

Indorama Ventures Limited (IVL), a FORTUNE Global 2000 chemical company specializing in the production of PET polymers, polyester, and bi-component fibers, wools, and yarns, was seeking to create a purpose-driven corporate brand to connect its business and brand strategy for continued growth.

Over the course of the past 20 years, IVL had acquired several smaller companies around the world to enhance its offering but chose to retain the subsidiary brand names—mainly due to their recognition in the marketplace.

The result was that IVL had acquired several cultures—many of which were not familiar with IVL or what its mission and goals were. Our goal was not to quash the positive aspects of those subsidiary’s cultures or people but to create a sense of belonging for all of the subsidiaries by helping to create one corporate, umbrella IVL brand that the employees could understand, embrace, rally around and see the benefits thereof. In this way, employees could then speak and act under one IVL voice that provided clarity for everyone.

Our challenge? Determine the most relevant brand position, messaging, and tagline to inform the first IVL corporate internal and external brand launch.

To get us grounded, we conducted a competitive messaging audit, interviewed heads of IVL’s various business units, and reviewed IVL’s current marketing and communication materials.

The insight

Since most employees, customers and prospects weren’t that familiar with the full scope of IVL’s offerings, we knew we needed to first bring the brand to life internally with our global workforce before launching our IVL corporate brand with external stakeholders.

Based on that, we developed four purpose-driven positioning statements for review with IVL business leads—which were narrowed to two and then brought to life in the form of creative expressions.

The creative expressions, which essentially looked like finished external ads, helped bring the two positions—”Empowering Potential” and “Collaborating for Impact” to life. “Empowering Potential” focused on trying to connect our Indorama Ventures corporate brand identity to our short-hand of IVL and help separate us from the other Indorama entities that can create customer confusion and even potential investor confusion.

Using a series of two corporate or omnibus campaign expressions to convey IVL’s key strengths, we conducted 18 one-on-one qualitative with global customers and prospects to learn:

Of the two brand positions we developed, which was most viable for IVL today and the future
Determine which visuals and messaging were most meaningful to business decision-makers and influencers.
Uncover potential communication issues and opportunities to improve how IVL should go to market.

The two taglines anchored the campaign expressions we developed to support each of the positions and were tested with customers and prospects.

So what did the research yield? The “Empowering Potential” position was perceived to be the most relevant and differentiating among our customers and prospects of the two campaign expressions.

The research also helped us refine our messaging, which included a stronger linkage between what IVL produced as an intermediary and how what IVL makes benefits them and their customers—including more emphasis on and demonstrating more proof of what IVL was doing in the areas of recyclability and sustainability.

The outcome

Once we had our refined brand in place, we shifted our attention to activating the new IVL corporate brand internally to educate over 20,000 employees in 101 locations worldwide that they were, in fact, part of a much larger corporate organization.

Based on that, we knew the brand training needed to:

Be self-guided by IVL brand ambassadors
Eliminate potential brand confusion due to multiple Indorama entities
Explain the benefits of branding IVL—and, in some cases, the importance of being part of a larger entity
Explain how IVL was going to tell its brand story
Contain interactivity to keep trainees engaged
Discuss employee roles in helping to deliver the IVL brand successfully

The program consisted of:

Development of two brand training decks translated for 16 languages. A 2-hour brand training deck to train the trainers and a 30-minute version to be used by the trainers to train the IVL global workforce.
Several two-and-a-half-hour brand training sessions to train IVL business marketers and H.R. leads who would ultimately train over 200 IVL brand ambassadors/trainers. Two sets of training toolkits were also developed business marketers and H.R. site managers
A brand ambassador recruitment campaign was also executed in multiple languages, distributed by H.R. leads of each respective company through a series of breakroom posters designed to reach the shop floor. Emails were used to reach sales and other professionals.
An internal launch tactical program built on the EIC framework of 18 months of brand-related activities. Elements consisted of:

Regional Town Hall events
IVL brand pull-up banners which featured how the various IVL business units were supporting the brand promise with their products and services
Brand education “Did you know” and Take the IVL Challenge” quizzes delivered through print and digital channels
Employee brand storytelling— asking employees to share their personal stories on how they are helping empower IVL’s customers’ potential around the globe. The user-generated content was used to develop a series of employee-focused pull-up banners.

We received an overwhelming response of volunteers interested in becoming trainers who would eventually go on to help train the global workforce of over 20,000 employees. The effort is ongoing.

Indorama Ventures

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