Rome wasn’t built in a day but marketing agency Merchant Cantos wasn’t too far off when in just four months, it rebuilt the RHI and Magnesita brands under a unified name to reflect the newly merged empire. Conjoined, the two are worth €2.5 billion in revenue, have 14,000 employees and produce 120,000 individual products, including cement, steel glass and paper.
The size of the challenge in such a short time frame was clear; not only must the merged business have a new identity by the time of the acquisition, it also had to land before the company’s re-listing from the Vienna to the London Stock Exchange, where it is now a FTSE 250 company.
“It was about establishing them from being two Austrian and Brazilian companies that both work within their own space and have offices across the world, to this undisputed global leader that’s going to list on the London Stock Exchange and give access to new people and new markets,” explains Andy Burridge, senior account manager at Merchant Cantos.
Working against the clock
Marketing teams working on a rebrand of this scale are often faced with a ticking clock. Although a merger will be in the air for months, it’s not until the deal is signed and sealed that the marketing teams can begin the overhaul, and it’s usually with little time left. “Normally there’s a much longer delay before it comes out into the wild,” confirms Kate Stark, director brand strategy at the agency.
With the deadline cutting it fine, the pressure was on Merchant Cantos to knuckle down and create a leading brand for their client. “I think timing is terribly difficult,” says Andy, “you go from a period when you pitch for the work and you’re really excited about it and then suddenly you have to deliver it.”
This meant the agency had to become quickly associated with the characteristics of the company in order to reposition it in a way that reflected its new direction – something Andy says meant them becoming an extension of the business.
With the clients busy working on every inch of the reformed business, the time dedicated to marketing was rationed; it was essential Merchant Cantos made the most of every portion they had. “There was a lot of groundwork taking up time and attention from the team, so we needed to ensure we made the most of the opportunities we had with them and with their leadership,” explains Kate.
Researching the vision
Merchant Cantos needed to create an aesthetic that reflected RHI Magnesita’s vision of what the company would become – something that had only previously been discussed in terms of finance and strategy. Andy and Kate knew this meant spending the valuable time they had with leadership discussing how both sides of the company would be represented in visual form.
“We wanted to ensure the message had a consistent tone all the way across,” explains Andy, who describes their workshops with leadership as the ‘fun break’ amid other pressures. “They would come in and get to talk about exciting things like the passion behind the company, what it means, who they are and their ambition – as well as looking at creative and design.”
With leadership insight under their belt, the agency combined their thoughts with wider industry research to come up with various versions of how the rebrand should look. “We used this to show them a very clear and simple way of describing what we think encapsulated their shared vision for the future of the company,” recalls Kate.
Building a brand
For Merchant Cantos, rebranding started with a blank canvas. As Kate points out, the refractory industry is a traditionally industrial one and brand is not something particularly valued.
“The brand was little more than a logo for both companies and there wasn’t a visual system or a well-developed brand position or identity,” Kate explains. “There was nothing beyond a mere logo, which was used in a rubber stamp way to put on products and documents.”
How do you find inspiration when starting from nothing? The agency team decided the answer was the tangible materials RHI Magnesita created and sold, so they visited manufacturing plants to witness the process first-hand. “Being in that physical space where all of this activity is happening and seeing the shapes, colours and sounds was really exciting,” says Kate.
She pinpoints seeing the business in action as the moment that really inspired the new company logo. “The combination of that with the thoughts from leadership was really where the magic happened,” she says.
Crossing cultures
Now an international company trading across 180 countries, the merger brought an abundance of cultures (both internal and external), which all needed to be considered. “We always ensured everything was reviewed by people representing different regions and audiences because while Austrian and Brazilian culture were heavily represented, there’s also a lot of business happening in China and North America,” explains Kate.
This meant bringing cultural representation into the agency’s leadership workshops was imperative. “We had the head of sales for China, plus Europe and other people from those areas,” Andy examples.
This allowed the diverse company culture to influence the new design, but time restrictions limited how much cultural research they could do; Kate admits if they’d had longer it’s something they would have dedicated more time to. “Of course we had to be efficient with the time and make sure there were no gaps left, but there was no going out on a roadshow like you’d normally do,” she says.
The agency was looking to bridge gaps across cultures and this didn’t just mean in terms of nationality. “The difference between the people who work in the plants and the people who work in the offices was probably the main thing we wanted to ensure we were bridging,” Kate explains.
There was a checklist of factors that needed to be taken into account. “We knew the different sections of the business were important, so iconography helped,” says Andy. “RHI Magnesita had previous pieces of animation before, but we pushed a little bit further down that line and helped to make it a little bit more functional across all areas and have a system in place.”
A multipurpose marketing campaign
Merchant Cantos needed to create marketing that would galvanise support both internally and externally. “A lot of it was multi-purpose,” says Kate, when discussing the content they created. “There were a few things we did different versions of for internal versus external use, but given the timelines we tried to ensure that most of the big deliverables could be used for both.”
The message of RHI Magnesita as a worldwide leader providing a bright future for the refractory industry was designed to be appealing and intriguing to both audiences. “It’s a dual purpose message that’s compelling for investors and customers, as well as employees who are going through this period of uncertainty as the two companies merge,” Kate explains.
The agency introduced the brand concept to employees in the build-up to the official launch by releasing photography and material. “One of the things we did with external advocates in the lead up was to give an introduction into what the company would look like so it wouldn’t be big splash on day one with everyone thinking it’s all changed overnight,” says Andy.
A huge shakeup such as this can evoke a range of emotions for employees who may feel it signifies a drastic and detrimental shift in how they do things. Merchant Cantos recognised this and decided that giving the CEO a personal and reassuring image was imperative to ease these concerns. “We did an interview with the CEO which went out to all the internal employees on day one,” explains Andy. “That was the first time a lot of the employees, particularly on the Magnesita side, had seen the CEO not just announcing and talking about what the new company is, but also what kind of person he is. Humanising him a bit gave people the chance to see him in a new light.”
The first glimpse of feedback
For Kate and Andy, such a huge undertaking has been both a personal and professional achievement, something they credit to the refractory company as well as their own extensive agency team. “[RHI Magnesita] made this change incredibly quickly, you’d never know that a couple of months ago the new office was a completely different brand and company name,” Kate says.
The refractory industry is a somewhat covert one and for Kate, this contributes even more to the agency’s success, as she describes the project as a huge learning curve. “I think it’s fair to say we had never heard of this industry before this rebrand arrived,” she confesses. “The journey for us from going from zero to deeply integrated in this completely hidden world has been very rewarding.”
The merger is still in its early stages but the team has already received positive anecdotal feedback, especially from students, a demographic common to RHI Magnesita’s recruitment process via apprenticeships and graduate schemes. Andy says the line ‘can you stand the heat?’ that was printed across all of the newly branded HR content was particularly popular. “The week after [RHI Magnesita] was announced as a new company, they went to a fair with rebranded stands,” he says. “Lots of students said they now thought RHI Magnesita was a cool company, so it was great to have HR people out there so early to get that feedback from an external audience.”
Senior leadership, who played a pivotal part in the brainstorming process, were equally pleased. “We’ve had many say it’s fantastic,” confirms Andy. Although the merger is now complete, Merchant Cantos have stayed working alongside the refractory company to build momentum behind the brand during its youth. “We’re travelling around the world to the plants and still meeting people and we’re just getting more and more positive comments about the images and messaging around it,” Andy continues.
So what’s the catalyst for this success? Andy believes it’s down to their consistent message announcing a new global leader is on the scene. “You can see how that language has been taken up by audiences and I think that’s what made it quite important to have that simple and powerful statement. It comes back to that all the time,” he says.
