It could easily be argued that when ITT Industries decided last year to brand itself anew, it deemed employee Lisa Miller just as important as President and CEO Travis Engen - a strategy that seems far-fetched in the sophisticated 1990s when spotlighting high-profile executives is all the rage for growing companies courting Wall Street.
Miller isn't an ITT principal, nor is she from ITT's high-level executive cadre. She makes night vision equipment in Roanoke, Va., and is just one of 35,000 employees of the global giant. But she became a needed piece of the brand puzzle when her employer decided to reinvent itself after media, customer, employee and investor confusion lingered about the company's core services and its more than 35 separate value centers.
ITT Industries is a spin-off of ITT Corp. which divided in 1995. Its hundreds of products include diversified goods sold under the Flygt, Bell & Gossett and Gilfillan names. Some financial targets believed it was in the hotel or casino business, since for a long time the name was linked to the ITT-Sheraton brand.
During an integrated communications campaign that brought together ITT VP of Corporate Relations Tom Martin, PR firm Ketchum, ad monolith Doremus, research leader Yankelovich Partners and corporate identity firm Landor Associates, Miller represented the launch's "engineering" theme that the company hoped to convey to its constituent audiences as it rounded the corner into a new business chapter in the fall of 1998.
The more than 1,000-plus engineers employed by the White Plains, N.Y.-based engineering and manufacturing company became crucial to the company's facelift, scoring national media attention and drumming up interest in their respective hometowns. KWHY-TV, Channel 22 in Los Angeles, interviewed engineer Leroy Magana who works out of the Santa Ana, Calif., ITT-owned Cannon facility and works on smart-card technology (an IC chip on the card is pegged to replace magnetic-strip cards).
On the PR side, employees such as Magana became just as relevant to the company's new image as its "Engineered Blocks" symbol (ITT letters are transformed into nine identical right-angled squares) and "Engineered for Life" tag line. In addition to Miller and Magana, there was Joe Nigro, a research and development technician at ITT Industries' Goulds Pumps unit in Seneca Falls, N.Y., and a second-generation Goulds Pumps employee.
By featuring real ITT employees in its ads, promotional materials, press kits and releases, employee communications and on its Web site, ITT gave its brand a human element that the media loved (other coverage included Bloomberg, Brandweek, CNBC, CNNfn and Fox News Now). That's no easy course when your $4.5-billion-in-sales company is competing in a global market that is far more fixated on technology and profits than on employees.
And the Numbers Are...
To date, market research continues to trickle in providing the measurement ITT needs to claim victory. When several hundred employees were surveyed post-campaign about their familiarity with ITT, 84 percent (up from 67 percent) said they knew the company "extremely well."
ITT welcomes those promising statistics. Yankolovich 1997/98 research proved that a broad swath of those in the financial arena knew the ITT name, but two-thirds of several hundred portfolio managers, for example, had no idea what the company sold.
"People knew ITT - it had been around for 75 years, but they didn't know what we stood for," said Martin of the campaign, including the approximate $150,000 earmarked for PR. Constituent audiences also hearkened back to the days of the original company, International Telephone & Telegraph, founded in the early 1920s.
But along with Miller, the company told its new identify story via engineers from Seneca Falls, N.Y., Auburn Hills, Mich., Southern California, Fort Wayne, Ind., Stockholm and from a town outside Vienna, Austria. Their names and faces were woven through every aspect of the campaign.
Often, branding strategies are tweaked in closed-door meetings and other input becomes secondary. But the level of buy-in for this campaign is further conveyed in the fact that ITT held periodic international meetings in New York, Stockholm and Amsterdam to explain to - and get input from - business-unit heads to make sure that its vision was a shared one. Sometimes as many as 100 execs attended.
And in the end, ITT didn't serve up to the financial world and the press a homogeneous group of male executive committee members or a staunch board of directors. The brand was officially launched Sept. 17, 1998, when Engen rang the opening bell of the New York Stock Exchange with a cast of engineers in tow.
Another component that created congruity? A final touch included preparing a meetings-in-a-box kit for employees so they could have access to the company's media plan, new logo (emblazoned on the gift of a ball cap) and a special edition of an internal newspaper.
The Backdrop to that Day
Although the brand launch was centered around a $6 million advertising campaign ushered in with the help of the NYSE event, media relations was key from the get-go. Ketchum dug its heels into a media relations strategy it honed after studying The Wall Street Journal.
"We noticed that the Journal was offering its beat reporters the opportunity to pen advertising columns (in WSJ's "Marketplace") about the companies they followed," says Ketchum Corporate Practice VP Megan Kahn. "We first noticed this when [WSJ writer] Elizabeth MacDonald wrote about Andersen Consulting in June 1998, so we offered [WSJ writer] Gordon Fairclough an exclusive and he took it."
On launch day, Fairclough's piece ran. It chronicled the campaign as well as hit on the unassuming aspects of the project, including a TV spot featuring sea life singing in the style of Handel's "Hallelujah" chorus, and this verbiage: "Communities around the world are cleaning up their water with the help of durable pumps engineered by ITT Industries."
Again, the engineering theme.
Kahn says the campaign has been viewed as such a success that it's providing the foundation for how the agency handles accounts, specifically bringing in the "real people" angle. (ITT, 914/641-2157; Ketchum, 212/448-4234)