Saint-Gobain

The Challenge

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.

The Insight

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 Solution

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 Result

We helped Saint-Gobain address internal organizational challenges and realign their online marketing and communications, launch a new website, and provide more compelling career information. 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. Once clear content governance was defined, we managed 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.