Saint-Gobain Group

In 2021, the Saint-Gobain Group worldwide adopted a new overarching corporate objective Making the world a better home. It reflects the Group’s impact through its products on the quality of life – living, working and the environment in which we live – of people in dozens of countries, including Poland. Icon Strategies was tasked with communicating the new goal in Poland to the company’s wide range of stakeholders and employees.

Challenge

Saint-Gobain operates globally. In Poland, it owns more than a dozen brands whose products are used in the construction of offices, flats, houses, schools and urban infrastructure. The company has a real impact on the environment in which we live. In 2021, it adopted the overarching corporate goal ‘Making the world a better home’. It was tasked with providing a unique context and communicating the new goal to a wide range of stakeholders, including employees at more than a dozen sites.

Assessment

An analysis of the products, based on interviews with experts in their development at each of the dozen or so plants, showed, in addition to their application in many areas of Polish life, that the vast majority of them did not exist 10 years ago. Technological advances in the industry mean that the products currently being developed in the company’s laboratories will create the cities of the future, naturally fitting in with the overarching objective adopted.

Strategy

We identified as a key insight the fact that products are already being designed today that will create the cities of the future and investigated with the help of world-class experts, for the first time to such an extent, what kind of cities we will be living in in the future involving all target groups in the discussion and embedding S-G experts in this context, in addition to strongly involving employees.

Implementation

The Polish Cities of the Future 2050 project consisted of two stages.

A series of video interviews conducted by Dariusz Bugalski, a leading radio journalist and a specialist in challenging conversations – here with prominent architects, scientists, industry experts and businessmen, in which they discussed the prospects for urban development in the next 30 years. The interviews were made available in the SoMe of the company and brands, on the campaign website, but also in the SoMe of the companies and organisations of the interview protagonists – architectural offices, universities, leading companies. And also in key industry media – in their SoMe or on their pages. Each interview opened with an invitation from a director of one of the S-G firms with activities corresponding to the title of the episode. This allowed the managers to be involved and facilitated communication to the inside of the subsidiary companies (already carried out in-house by the companies).

In a second stage we inaugurated a report on the development of Polish cities in 2050, whose partner was the Polish Association for Future Studies. Foresight was developed by a company working for, among others, UNESCO and WHO. The partnership gave the report the rank of the first such in-depth report in its category. Part of it was the conclusions of strategic workshops with managers and experts from S-G Group companies actively involved in the development of future products.

We structured the report in such a way as to be able to create the first ranking of the cities most likely to become the city of the future in 2050. This allowed us to reach out to key regional media and the authorities of the largest conurbations and, in some cases, to communicate the results together.

Outcomes

The interviews were viewed by several thousand people interested in the development of Polish cities.

More than 200 quality publications appeared on the campaign, the share of voice of S-G was 90% and the reach was nearly 1 million. Key regional media, as well as leading trade media, wrote about the campaign. The longest TV piece fully dedicated to the report lasted nearly 30 minutes.

The report was referred to by the authorities of the largest agglomerations. The results of the ranking were announced with the authorities of Warsaw, the winner, at a joint press conference. The company’s experts also began talks with the magistrate about strengthening cooperation.

On the basis of the report, which was distributed to all employees, the directors of the subsidiaries launched internal information campaigns dedicated to the Group’s new objective.

The report was of such interest to academics that academics at the largest polytechnics proposed extending the analysis to include student surveys. The joint project was implemented in the first half of 2022.

Awards

The Polish Cities of the Future 2050 campaign won the highest award – the Golden Paperclip award in the Research & Insight category at Golden Clips 2022, the largest PR industry competition in Poland, the highest award – PR Wings in the Corporate PR category, at PR Wings 2022 and the Golden Award at ESG Leaders 2021 competition in the educational campaign category.