trategically and secretly — but with one big visual splash: That’s how the state-run, German coal-mining company Ruhrkohle AG (RAG) reinvented and rebranded itself as a clean, creative industrial force known as Evonik Industries. With RAG, a well known corporate presence in Germany’s Ruhr region, intending to hold an initial public stock offering under the Evonik name in 2008, creating a solid brand that everyone inside and outside the company recognized and could understand was an essential business initiative. To create such solid awareness and understanding, the company’s new values, tenets, and characteristics had to be shared with its constituencies in a seamless rollout.

Evonik Industries AG was formed when the state-run RAG consolidated its separate real estate, energy, and chemical concerns into a €14.8 billion conglomerate. Known as RAG, the company’s old brand was strongly tied to its region (Ruhrkohle refers to its proximity to the Ruhr river) and business — primarily coal mining. So as RAG dusted off the grit of coal mining and re-emerged as Evonik, wearing new, regal purple hues, the company prepared to go public by putting its best face forward. That meant strategically sharing its new look and personality with the people who create the public face of a company: the executives, the employees, and the media.

As part of its rebranding from RAG to Evonik, the company positioned itself as a creative industrial group that includes the formerly independent chemical company Degussa and energy entity Steag, along with RAG’s real estate division, RAG Immobilien. Working with the Wuppertal-based Vok Dams Gruppe, a live marketing company in Germany, RAG shed the old brand in favor of Evonik — an invented name that offered the newly formed company an opportunity to define itself and to set its own corporate tone. To launch the new brand, Evonik and Vok Dams created an integrated-marketing extravaganza, with commercial and print media support from Hamburg, Germany-based advertising agency KNSK. It also rolled out a new corporate color — deep purple, meant to convey creativity, ambition, and a modern approach to business — selected by XEO, a Dusseldorf, Germany-based communications agency that analyzed the visual brands of other major companies, and found that the new Evonik purple was unique in the market.

Of course, rebranding is easy in theory. But unless stakeholders both inside and outside the company understand the change, embrace its meaning, and uphold the new brand tenets every day, rebranding will ultimately fail. To ensure success, Evonik and Vok Dams conceived a series of events built around a live brand transformation and reveal. There would be one event for each of its key audiences: a sneak preview for the executives, a road show for the employees in the company’s diverse locations, and the big event, a dramatic veiling and unveiling of the company’s headquarters to signal to the region — namely, the media and local neighbors — that where a coal-mining company once stood, now towered a creative industrial group known as Evonik.

AUDIENCE NO. 1: EXECUTIVES

No matter how well defined a brand may be on paper, or how well its advertising and marketing meets its desired public persona, there’s no getting around the fact that it’s the top-level executives who truly set the tone. How a company views the marketplace, what its ambitions are, how sacred it holds its mission and values — all of this is conveyed to the rank and file by top leadership. Evonik’s leadership came from three distinct entities that had never worked together under the old RAG corporate umbrella. For this significant restructuring and rebranding to be successful, these execs would need to get on board with the new brand — and fast. “The executives had to get to know the brand and its character,” says Sandra Hiller, events director and member of the Vok Dams management team. “Them, above all, because they communicate the brand’s qualities and exemplify them to their employees through daily life.”

Executives entered a fully whitewashed space as their first stop in the rebranding-rollout event. The neutral territory cleared executives’ minds, evoking a blank slate for the transformation to come.

Before the public unveiling of the new corporate identity, the executives gathered for a conference at the Engine House in Duisburg Nord Country Park, a location that held historical and geographical significance for the company. The park emerged from a now-defunct 450-acre industrial site in the Ruhr region which dates back to the 1850s. Over the past 15 years, it has been transformed into a scenic, historical site that includes Europe’s largest man-made diving facility, rock-climbing routes built into old ore bunkers, and a wilderness area that is home to a variety of birds. The Engine House was the location where, four years earlier, RAG chairman (and now Evonik chairman) Dr. Werner Müller had shared his vision for the company: “RAG in motion.” Here, honoring the link to RAG, Evonik’s executives were introduced to their new company’s motto: “The Power to Create.”

To help the executives set aside any preconceived notions about the new company, their minds were “whitewashed” in a dramatic, visual transition. “Upon entering the Engine House, the executives arrived in a white room. This room facilitated the farewell to RAG,” Hiller says. The room, meant as a soothing place for the executives to gather and to lessen any tension around the brand rollout, also symbolized the clean energy and services of the three business areas — chemicals, energy, real estate — that had been unified in a kind of “white division” that would stand alone from the coal business, which would continue on as RAG.

With relaxed and open minds, the executives moved from this white room into a round one, where they were seated on a circular platform. With revolving stages and a 360-degree multimedia performance, Hiller says the executives were quite literally wrapped in the new company’s ethos. The presentation, filled with vibrant imagery and acrobatics, brought the new entities’ core brand attributes to life: creativity, specialization, self-renewal, and reliability. As performers moved through the space while projected images ebbed and flowed along the walls, the executives were asked to consider, for example, the nature of creativity, and how Evonik as a company could build and live up to the executives’ definition of creativity. Images representing classical creativity, such as Leonardo da Vinci’s paintings and sketches, set a visionary tone while helping to inspire imaginative conversations.

The idea was to transport the executives out of any particular time, location, or space, and deliver them into the imagination of Evonik. “The presentation demonstrated the new company’s brand and its competencies, and left the executives with the feeling of ‘We are Evonik!’” Hiller says. Following the rollout, the executives enjoyed dinner in a third room, while continuing their discussions of the new brand attributes that they would need to, from this afternoon forward, champion and reflect.

According to Hannelore Heck, event-management director at Evonik, the event’s use of creativity to inspire connection with the new brand attributes was powerfully effective with this group of industrial executives. “The emotional explanation of the brand and the emotionally charged design of the presentation allowed them to find themselves within the new brand, simplifying the transition to identification with the new. It set the tone with excitement, anticipation, and enthusiasm for the future,” she reports.

AUDIENCE NO. 2: EMPLOYEES

	In the midst of a large round room, a multimedia presentation featuring acrobats brought the new entity’s brand attributes to life: creativity, specialization, self-renewal, and reliability.

If introducing a new corporate brand and mission to nearly 340 executives from three entirely separate companies seems complex, consider the logistics of bringing into the fold more than 43,000 employees in hundreds of locations, whose roles ranged from chemical engineers to real estate professionals to administrative workers to manufacturing staff to marketing managers and more. “Different corporate cultures needed to merge,” says Hiller, of the union between the former RAG Immobilien, Degussa, and Steag. “Therefore, flexible marketing tools were needed which adapted not only to all the sites but as well to different hours due to shift workers.”

Although the employees knew change was on the way, they were unaware of the details about how that would happen and what it would mean for them. And of course, the name and tagline of the new company were a mystery. Bringing the brand to life for all employees required a 33-location road show hosted over the course of 19 days, beginning Sept. 12, 2007 — just after revealing the Evonik brand to the executives.

To pull this off, Vok Dams and Evonik put together four teams of eight people, including folks from Vok Dams, event hosts and promoters, and photographers. Their aim: to get regional staffers, no matter what their jobs, to fully understand the new brand by getting hands-on with the new brand attributes. To encourage creativity, for example, the teams installed interactive tools such as photo booths and greeting-card stations at each rollout event. Here, employees could take photos and turn them into cards which could be sent to celebrate the “newborn” company.

The teams were also given branded shirts to distribute to employees, and produced a newsletter overnight to engage employees in a campaign titled, “Wer macht denn sowas?” — or, “Who would do that?”

Before the unveiling events, the “Who would do that?” campaign reached out to employees with a print program featured striking visual images such as an elephant stuck to the side of a building, a bare hand surrounded by the flames of a blowtorch, and verdant lily pads rooted on the edge of a sand dune — all in the name of encouraging unconventional thinking and creativity. Intended to build curiosity in the weeks leading up to the public unveiling at the Evonik headquarters, the images invited scrutiny through unconventional pairings of common objects, playing off viewers’ assumptions about how those objects should work and what role they play. After the unveiling, the campaign offered solutions to the questions raised in the materials. For example, the image of the elephant stuck on the building was now accompanied by a more-specific query stating, “Actually, who gives glue its adhesive power? We do!”

A 19-day, 33-stop road show brought the Evonik brand to life for all 43,000 employees, from chemical-plant workers to real-estate property managers. Hands-on activities encouraged creativity among the staff, making the new brand values tangible.

The overnight newsletter-production plan was also a leak-preventer of sorts, ensuring that the brand would remain a secret until the moment it was revealed to the employee group at each location. With no loose copies about there was no chance of accidental brand previews.

“During the 19-day tour, the employees who could not attend the ‘big bang’ at the company’s Ruhr headquarters became a cohesive Evonik community,” Hiller says. During the road show, the teams distributed more than 31,000 shirts with the new brand to employee attendees. “The high levels of attendance at the road show stops proved the success of the events. In a fresh way, the road-show events gave our employees an emotional understanding of their new brand, so they were able to understand and internalize the new identity quickly — and with pride,” Heck says.

AUDIENCE NO. 3: NEIGHBORS AND THE LOCAL MEDIA

In the same way that Vok Dams created the white room event to wow the executives, the company needed to impress the locals, too. With RAG deeply connected to the Ruhr region, simply putting a new company name on the headquarters in Essen wouldn’t do. Instead, the building was veiled, almost Christo-like, with three layers of high-tech fabric that allowed then-RAG and Vok Dams to let the community know a change was on the way.

At the start of September 2007, in plain view of the community and the media, the old RAG logo was removed from the building. The building was then covered in what appeared to be a plain, gray material, which evoked a feeling of the corporate slate being cleared to make way for a new identity. But at night, the neutral fabric shimmered with brilliant, holographic colors. “It attracted the attention of the complete region and signified, ‘Something is happening here. The change has begun,’” Hiller says.

Not long after the veiling, the first of three layers of fabric was partially peeled away. On one side of the building, the words “Guten Tag” were revealed, and on the adjacent side, “Hi” became visible. Eventually, the full message, “Guten Tag, ich bin neu hier!” and its translation “Hi, I’m the new one!” were visible to all.

The day of the final unveiling, Sept. 12, was marked with great fanfare. After a press conference staged outside the building’s main entrance, the final layer of the façade was removed in concert with trumpets and other music to reveal the new Evonik name, logo, and characteristic deep-purple color, and “power to create” logos. “The impressive staging lived up to the claim, the power to create, and showed how a powerful and creative group can reposition itself,” Hiller says. “It filled the new and unknown Evonik brand with emotion, and was a thrilling moment for everyone.”

	Over the course of about 10 days, the familiar RAG identity was removed and the new Evonik brand gradually revealed on the façade of the company’s headquarters in Essen, Germany. With strong regional ties, Evonik believed that involving the community in its rebranding celebration was an essential component to the effort’s success.

With more than 43,000 RAG employees (not to mention Ruhr-region residents who saw the company’s presence every day), keeping the new brand quiet was no small task, especially given the long lead-time from concept development to launch. “One of the most fundamental challenges was the almost conspiratorial secrecy of all parties concerned,” Hiller says. “Everybody worked for nearly two years to keep up the suspense, working with logo and color dummies, production of all relevant material with minimal involvement of human resources, and an approval process with third parties that were not allow to know much.”

But the ultimate challenge, Hiller says, was staging the elaborate launch on relatively short notice — despite the lengthy rebranding-planning process. The original launch was scheduled for Oct. 19, 2006, but because of political factors including pending legislation limiting workforce reductions in Germany, the event was postponed several times, creating a delay that was nearly a year long. “The spectacular event with immense logistic efforts had to be on hold. We did not know when launch approval would come, and the event was eventually realized within a very short timeframe as soon as all the legislative issues were resolved,” Hiller says.

One of the significant last-minute tasks was ordering the material for the building wrap — the keystone of the big tah-dah. While the first layer was ordered early in the process, as the plan to wrap the building had been approved early on, ordering the second and third layers was at the mercy of launch confirmation due to the team’s great pains to maintain secrecy. Those layers, which hinted at and finally revealed the new identity, were ordered just six weeks before the grand unveiling event.

Evonik executives addressed the media at a press conference in the company’s headquarters building immediately following the façade reveal and celebration.

THE SECRET'S OUT

As Evonik now prepares to go public, it is reporting solid business performance. The chemicals group, formerly Degussa, is a market leader in 80 percent of its product and technology areas, which include biotech, pharmaceuticals, automotive, and plastics. Its energy component, formerly Steag, is Germany’s fifth-largest energy producer and the market leader in biomass power plants. And the real estate group, which provides housing for more than 150,000 people, maintains vacancy and tenancy turnover rates that beat the industry average.

Its chemicals lines have seen sales increases of 2 percent, energy reports 8-percent growth, and real estate reports a marginal decline of 3 percent since the three entities merged to form Evonik. Overall, the company reported a 4-percent uptick in sales to €14.8 billion, from the prior year’s €14.2 billion.

Put simply Evonik is moving forward, Hiller says. “Its three business areas stand for substantial power and economic growth potential. The excitement of introducing the Evonik brand could not have been accomplished by only airing a commercial sequence or taking out an ad. It was the global campaign that made it a success. There was only one chance to succeed, and it worked.” Adds Heck, “Evonik Industries, as a company which normally has no contact to its end consumers at all, very successfully established its new identity by integrating the public, the media, and the mass market into the metamorphosis.” And with executives, employees, and the media all rallied around the new Evonik brand, the next project with just one chance to succeed — the upcoming IPO — is well prepped for success. e