Background
Hay Group is undergoing a global internal communications drive to establish new brand values. Nine ‘brand behaviours’ will form a central part of staff training and assessments.
Hay Group required high levels of awareness among staff of these brand behaviours, the rationale underpinning them and the impact their application will have.
Because of pre-existing activities, the campaign had to run over six months. Concep Evolution’s challenge was to sustain interest among staff in a teaser campaign operating for this amount of time.
By the programme’s end, 96 per cent of staff had engaged with the campaign. With 3141 employees in 86 offices across 55 countries, this near universal exposure to the new brand behaviours among Hay Group staff meant Concep Evolution had outstripped the client’s expectation. As a result of stringent reporting and vigilant monitoring at all stages, Concep Evolution was able to identify issues, adapt to challenges and maintain a highly-effective strategy.
Business context
Hay Group became a client of Concep Evolution in 2007. In that time, it developed new brand guidelines, which Concep Evolution adapted for, and implemented across, digital media. This included the launch of a new website and the branding and positioning of all events and related websites and communications.
The next stage saw Hay Group roll out brand behaviours internally. A set of nine behaviours was created by Hay Group’s internal communications agency. These took the form of nine ‘be’ words – Begin, Belong, Become, Beloved, Befriend, Believe, Beyond, Being, Bedazzle – each encapsulating a brand behaviour and the Group’s core brand values.
During staff reviews, each employee will be assessed against the behaviours relevant to their role. An agreement about which behaviours are to be assessed takes place during 2009, with assessments following one year later. Therefore, awareness of what these behaviours stand for, and what their impact may be, is essential.
Hay Group needed Concep Evolution to develop a low-cost direct communications campaign offering maximum impact.
The campaign faced a number of challenges. Primarily – as it had to run alongside, and complement, a pre-existing timetable of events – emails had to maintain maximum impact over six months.
Measuring effectiveness would also prove challenging. The global nature of the business creates a huge number of variables to consider when analysing data.
Objectives
The client’s aim was that staff be made aware of, and engaged by, new brand behaviours. Their central role in staff training and assessment made high levels of awareness imperative.
Strategy
Hay Group had existing offline collateral with colour schemes that were challenging to implement across digital media. Concep Evolution’s first task was to rework these to better suit an email campaign, while remaining true to Hay Group’s brand guidelines.
This complexity was compounded by the fact Hay Group operates Lotus Notes, and 80 per cent of staff carry a BlackBerry – requiring communications to be mobile friendly and render correctly on Lotus Notes.
Between July and September 2008, nine emails were sent, each comprising two pages. The first page introduced one of the nine ‘be’ words, while the second offered an explanation of the brand behaviour in question.
Concep Evolution also developed and implemented a screen saver, designed to encourage further interaction with, and awareness of, brand values.
Then – between October and December 2008 – four more emails were delivered, grouping the nine behaviours into distinct clusters to reinforce the message.
In August, following the first three emails, reporting confirmed a gradual drop in opened messages.
Despite believing this the result of summer holidays, Concep Evolution interrogated the data – at country level and for issues around deliverability – and found no discernible pattern or reason for reduced readership.
Therefore, it AB split the entire list. The randomly generated groups were further divided into ‘readers’ and ‘non-readers’. Readers being those who had opened at least one email; non-readers those who had failed to look at anything.
These two cohorts were sent different treatments, with non-readers receiving personalised messaging.
With each personalised email, increasing numbers of non-readers were converted into readers. By December, 96 per cent of staff had viewed the campaign.
The view rate of initial emails averaged at 50 per cent, but by the campaign’s end Concep Evolution had almost doubled this figure: 96 per cent had read a communication.
The turning point came after Week 4 (of 21) when Concep Evolution addressed the rate of ‘non-readers’. At this point, the number of non-readers stood at 641. This group was sent personalised messages, resulting in the number of non-readers dropping by almost half to 367.
With each personalised email an average of 8 per cent of non-readers was converted into readers. This rate was sustained across ten more emails, each one targeting fewer recipients as ‘non-readers’ fell in number.
Exposure was high, but so was engagement. 61.5 per cent of staff clicked through from the email to Hay Group’s intranet, to read fully about the brand behaviour concept. The development of content for the intranet was not requested by the client, but suggested by Concep Evolution following its experience of campaigns for other clients.
Hayley Brooksbank, head of marketing, EMEA, at Hay Group reports that response among staff has been extremely positive, with staff saying they felt well engaged by the campaign.
What Hay Group Say
“This campaign was uniquely challenging. With so many recipients, spread across a huge number of offices and countries, there were numerous variables to consider. Without vigilance, insightful reading of the data and the experience of campaigns for other clients, it would have been easy to make incorrect assumptions and flawed judgements,” says Brooksbank.
She adds, “The fact we got to 96 per cent is impressive. We got there by constantly reviewing our approach and the lists and it was a key focus for the team. Concep Evolution kept going when I would have given up.”
By the time of the campaign’s close, 96 per cent of staff had read the messaging and the concept of Hay Group’s brand behaviours was part of the company culture.
