Rebranding for Signify: from single to multi-brand strategy

Case Signify

Philips Lighting split off from its parent company Philips in 2016, adopting the new name of Signify. A year and a half later, there were plans for a major rebranding process. We were given under six months to rebrand all the websites and digital touchpoints, and support the digital organisation as it moved from a single to a multi-brand strategy.

Client: Signify

Digital Activation

Content management

Marketing insights and optimisation

Marketing Automation

Enormous scope

One of the biggest challenges of this project was its enormous scope. The existing website had to be partly transferred to a new domain. All the content relating to Philips Lighting products remained on the old website, but all corporate content was given a new home with the completely new brand identity.

Gigantic amount of content

This dynamic project involved processing a gigantic amount of content. Besides text, visuals and photos for dozens of pages, translations for no fewer than 72 different websites were also needed. Furthermore, we had to adapt the content on roughly 200 sites, including all the historical press releases. The plan also included completely restructuring the email marketing package. Many of these things could only be done at the last minute.

In the colleague words

‘Digital comes right at the end of the chain; designs often arrive late. You need to wait for IT before you can start. And you also have feedback to deal with, from – in this case – 30 different markets which had been used to being in charge of this themselves. The shift to central messaging had major consequences for them.’

Maarten van Haperen, Managing Consultant at intoAction

Approach

Impact analysis & involving stakeholders

We use a standardised approach to steer a project like this in the right direction and ensure that such a tight deadline is met. The first phase starts with an impact analysis. We do this really proactively because it is extremely important. We explore the impact the changes will have in terms of IT, privacy, legal and the various touchpoints. And we investigate which stakeholders are involved. These people all have to be brought on board. If you don’t involve them in every respect and in good time, problems are bound to arise later in the project.

Agile

Well-defined work packages

The next step is to set up a project organisation with clear roles and responsibilities. After that, we set to work with well-defined work packages, which spell out everything that is needed to achieve a particular result. For instance, to make a new webpage, you need design, IT components and content. If you haven’t accomplished all these elements at the start, you won’t get a comprehensive, first-class outcome. We deliver these work packages designed with agile methodology, such as sprints and demos. This not only ensures clarity, but also leaves room for flexibility.

Fulfilling our promise

The next step is the implementation, based on the action plan. We examine everything in detail: have we got everything we need? What has to happen for us to fulfil our promise? The fourth and last phase entails us handing over the project to the existing organisation, including providing new guidelines and training courses.

In the colleague words

‘We worked with a large team to produce, change, add and remove content according to a standardised process. At the go live, no fewer than 25 intoAction colleagues were involved in adjusting and customising everything. The scaling up luckily went really smoothly, precisely because we had prepared everything so well.’

Fabienne Lamers, Project Manager at intoAction

Foundation

From single brand to house of brands

This structured approach enabled us to meet the tight deadline. All the websites went live on time and on scope, even though the latter kept changing and we were bound to secrecy for a long time. The introduction of work packages and acceptance environments ensured that the project ran smoothly. The process we introduced laid the foundations for future rebranding processes and brand extensions at Signify.

Success stories

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