January MarketingMasters Luncheon Report

The 'Human Element' Campaign Puts the ‘Wow’ Back in Dow

By Don Talend
Write Results

Corporate repositioning can be a daunting task, especially for an industrial company such as The Dow Chemical Company, which, at first glance, does not seem to be on consumers’ minds nearly as much as more recognizable firms with popular consumer brands. In Dow’s case, successful corporate repositioning has meant conveying to customers, investors and employees how crucial the company’s work is to improving the human condition.

Patti Temple Rocks, Dow’s vice president of global public affairs, revealed at January’s BMA MarketingMasters luncheon seminar how the company’s “Human Element” campaign has connected chemistry and humanity—and, in the process, has produced tangible gains in corporate brand equity, awareness among influencers and employee engagement.

“Putting the Wow Back in Dow” promised to be a complex challenge for a venerable company that had sold off such popular brands as Ziploc bags and Scrubbing Bubbles bathroom cleaner.

Temple Rocks, who began her career with Dow in 1981, was with GolinHarris in early 2006 when the agency and DraftFCB were developing the Human Element campaign for Dow. A few months later Dow CEO Andrew Liveris persuaded her to rejoin Dow and help launch the campaign.

It was Liveris’ goal to make Dow the largest, most profitable and well-respected chemical company in the world. Temple Rocks indicated that Dow’s leadership knew the respect goal would be the catalyst for everything else.

The company formulated a reputation development strategy with four strategic pillars: setting the standard for sustainability, operational excellence, business and financial leadership, and a commitment to people and talent. From a brand development perspective, “we needed to make ourselves interesting again,” she said, adding that the public found corporate brands such as Microsoft much more interesting.

Dow’s leadership truly embraces corporate brand equity as a tangible asset. Temple Rocks referenced an Oct. 7, 2006, article in The Economist titled “Leaders: The search for talent” that provides insight into how highly Dow values brand equity. The article argues that the value of “intangible” assets, such as skilled workers, patents and know-how, has increased from 20% of the value of companies in the S&P; 500 to 70% in recent years.

But repositioning Dow and increasing its corporate brand equity would necessitate a bold communication strategy. “We knew that positioning ourselves as an ingredient maker or environmental steward wouldn’t get us to where we needed to be,” she said.

Sustainability is a key component of Dow’s reputation-building strategy. Temple Rocks noted that Dow has begun to pursue its sustainability goals in collaboration with the United Nations, which has established eight Millennium Development Goals of its own for 2015, including ensuring environmental sustainability.

For its part, Dow is focusing its sustainability strategy on using chemistry to create products and technology to solve three or four of the world’s most pressing problems, according to Temple Rocks. She compared these transcendent objectives to President John F. Kennedy’s commitment to put a man on the moon—the goal was established first, and the path to the goal would be determined later.

“We needed to do something bold in order to position ourselves differently from competitors,” she said. “The campaign had to touch people at an emotional level.” It was with this in mind that Dow and agencies GolinHarris and DraftFCB arrived at the Human Element concept, which would be marketed internationally.

This bold approach would not be an easy sell inside Dow, however. Temple Rocks noted that convincing a company heavily populated by engineers that the campaign would yield tangible results required plenty of boardroom work. Several times in past years, previous campaigns were stopped and started up again as financial conditions dictated in an industry subject to cyclical economics.

Dow’s first TV Human Element commercial conveyed the message that the most important element with which Dow is involved is the human element. The commercial was not only well received outside the company, but inside as well. Temple Rocks received numerous positive email messages about the campaign from Dow employees and she “noticed a collective de-slumping of the shoulders” throughout the company.

The public—notably science teachers and students—also provided a great deal of positive feedback on the commercial. The most telling compliment came from someone who wanted to obtain a copy of the commercial to play at the funeral of their chemist father.

The integrated Human Element campaign includes print advertising, a separate Web site linked through Dow.com and event marketing. The most high-profile event that demonstrates Dow’s commitment to the environment and humanity has been the Blue Planet Run, an around-the-world charity relay that was launched in 2007 to help fund projects to provide safe drinking water in countries such as India, Benin, Nicaragua and Malawi.

The company’s commitment to eliminating the single biggest cause of sickness and health-related death in the world also got the attention of its employees. Twenty Dow sites and about 19,000 Dow employees participated in Blue Planet Run events and employees raised more than $50,000 for the cause. According to employee surveys, more than 72% of employees reported high levels of awareness of the Blue Planet Run, and 65% thought that the campaign sponsorship was enhancing Dow’s reputation.

The Human Element campaign has gained recognition from multiple organizations. A recent brand awareness and favorability survey indicates that Dow’s brand reputation has increased from 6.0 to 6.4 on a 10-point scale since June of 2006, putting it ahead of other chemical companies. According to Temple Rocks, even the world’s most respected brands rarely score above an 8 on this survey.

The Human Element commercial won a Gold Hugo award for Best Commercial in the Chicago International Television Competition. The campaign also won a Platinum Award for Corporate Campaign of the Year 2007 from PRNews.

But the real measure of any marketing campaign’s effectiveness is whether or not it adds tangible value to the company, and the Human Element campaign has also succeeded in this regard. According to a June 2007 quarterly survey covering 1,200 companies by international brand identity consultancy CoreBrand (which measures the impact of brand equity appreciation on stock price), the value of the Dow brand grew by about $200 million during the previous year. Also, the company’s brand and reputation represent 16% of Dow’s total market capitalization—the highest percentage in the chemical industry.

Don Talend is president of Write Results, a print and e-communications project management company based in West Dundee, Ill.