John Cockerill
Marketing Consulting
Client
John Cockerill Environment
Project
Value Proposition and Branding
Expertise
Marketing Consulting
Busniess
Environment
Target
Engineers, technical buyers
Market
International
Need
John Cockerill is an international technology group based in Belgium. The company’s environmental division is active in the water, air & gas and waste management sectors. The company’s product portfolio is broadly diversified and constantly evolving, in particular through the acquisition of companies and technologies.
The diversity of products and markets served required a complete overhaul of its multiple value propositions and branding.
The goal of this project was to a) develop sales-oriented value propositions for all major product lines and applications and b) create a coherent naming for all products.
Approach
Our approach is based on collective intelligence. Information is gathered and decisions about its interpretation are made by consensus through the interplay of individual expertise.
For each product line, a full-day workshop was organized with marketing and sales people. The raw material for the value proposition was compiled through group work using various collaborative techniques (metaplan, brainstorming, co-writing, etc.). In a second step, the raw material was reformulated. In a third step, the naming of the entire product range was developed.
Realization
A total of 20 workshops were held for the three business lines and corresponding value propositions were developed. The sometimes highly technical topics were prepared by us on the basis of scientific literature research. This ensured smooth communication at eye level with the engineers involved.
Our role as moderator was to facilitate the discussions and to challenge assumptions. The controversial exchanges with and between the participants allowed new perspectives and arguments to emerge.
In a second step, the findings of the workshop were formulated as an argumentation paper.
A coherent, internationally compatible product nomenclature was then created for each business line.
Results
The collective and active involvement of the company’s knowledge holders made it possible to quickly develop value propositions and sales pitches for all key product lines in the environmental sector. The new, coherent naming strategy simplifies communication and improves brand perception.
