Royal DSM is a global science-based B2B company active in health, nutrition and materials. DSM delivers innovative solutions that nourish, protect and improve performance in global markets such as food and dietary supplements, personal care, feed, pharmaceuticals and medical devices. DSM’s 22,000 employees deliver annual net sales of approximately € 9 billion, and the company is listed on NYSE Euronext.
The challenge: ‘Nobody knows us’
To say that nobody knew DSM in 2011 would be a slight exaggeration. But as a diversified B2B player with a century of history behind it, DSM was definitely difficult to understand. The company had grown via a series of well-timed acquisitions and divestments, changing its focus and strategy repeatedly. It straddled a bewildering array of industrial sectors and produced a vast range of products. Responsibility for financial performance was largely delegated to its various business groups, which operated with a high level of autonomy. DSM was known as a solidly managed, technology-driven company – but external stakeholders found it hard to say exactly what that company did. DSM appeared to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
Planning of the rebrand was well in progress when the global economic crisis hit; hammering many of the industrial sectors on which DSM depended. Plans for the rebrand had to be shelved pending a more favourable economic climate.
Over the last few years DSM had made several developments, such as moving from being a chemicals conglomerate to a company with equally strong competencies in life sciences and materials sciences. DSM had taken the bold step of beginning to brand some of its generic nutritional products in terms of their inherent quality. Its quality promise was unique in the market, and rested on unparalleled quality management and quality assurance systems. The first product to be presented to the market in this way was DSM’s vitamin C, which was branded Quali-C and formed an umbrella arm of Quali brands known as Quality for Life.
These developments also had to be aligned with the launch of the new corporate brand when the rebrand was picked up again in 2011. The uncertain economic environment had an upside, after all, allowing time for a meticulous rethink of its corporate brand.
The solution: Coming to a cinema near you
The new corporate brand was launched on 23 February 2011. A new strapline was chosen: Bright Science. Brighter Living. It’s designed to describe the way DSM uses its unique scientific capabilities in productive partnership with its customers to create brighter lives for people today and generations to come. The company’s new sense of purpose, together with its clear emphasis on the single core value of sustainability, gained internal and external buy-in evident from the get-go.
To communicate this message internally DSM hired more than 130 commercial cinemas worldwide. And in those cinemas, it ran a film, ‘Bright Now’. Not a three-minute image movie. Not a half-hour documentary. But a specially commissioned, full-length feature film in which a fictional reporter, Jack Wang from Global Times, has a brief to find out as much as possible about DSM in the space of five days. Every one of the company’s 22,000 employees – distributed across more than 170 sites in almost 50 countries – was invited to a local screening. No fewer than 94 per cent of them watched the film during the first 48 hours of the launch.
Results
The film ‘Bright Now’, in combination with the strategy for launching the new brand internally, was winner of the Cannes European Corporate Media and TV Awards 2011, the European Digital Communications Awards 2011, and the European Transform 2012 Award for Excellence in Brand Transformation, to name but a few accolades. BrandFinance estimated that DSM’s brand increased by 23 per cent from USD 294 million in 2011 to USD 362 million as a result of the rebrand.
Director of global branding Jos van Haastrecht comments, “Key to our approach were working sessions with sales and marketing representatives from the business groups. These sessions enabled the language of Bright Science. Brighter Living. to be translated into the real conversations that sales and marketing people were having with customers. This approach encourages those with customer contact to have a ‘brighter conversation’ in a way that is relevant for their business operation.”
Co-branding – the most powerful endorsement
Since its launch in 2007, and assisted by the 2011 launch of DSM’s bright brand, Quality for Life has gained increasing recognition among customers around the world. As Will Black, marketing director human nutrition & health at DSM Nutritional Products, summarises, “The management of our innovative Quality for Life promise within the framework of Bright Science. Brighter Living. is a perfect example of how to connect corporate and product brand values in a manner which leads to clear market differentiation. The values we promised the market with Quali in 2007 are fully aligned with the transformational promise of DSM as a whole. Customers understand who we are, and they are coming to us for the innovative products, services and overall relationship that will help them to take their own businesses to the next level.”
