Becoming one IMI: interview with Erica Lockhart
IMI is a FTSE 100 global leader in fluid and motion control, with over 10,000 employees in 50 countries. We worked very closely with Roy Twite, CEO and Erica Lockhart, Group Communications Director and the wider IMI team to rebrand the business. Since then, we continue to support the business with brand communications.
Going through a rebrand can be challenging, but if done right the results are rewarding. We were excited to catch up with Erica to reflect on the rebrand and the lessons learnt.
Key takeaways:
Luminous: What was the catalyst for the rebrand?
Erica: IMI is about 160 years old. It’s grown through many acquisitions, so we had a complicated structure and a huge portfolio of brands. There was lots of sub-brands, divisions, different colours and completely different logos everywhere. It was a very confusing business to understand, even if you worked inside it, let alone if you were on the outside.
It’s a great business doing great work, but brand complexity was getting in the way of our ability to sell and tell our story. Even though rebranding is a huge exercise, we felt that if we want to have business in ten years’ time that everyone understands and has a clear proposition, then we had to fix that.
In fact, one of the divisions wanted to rebrand itself. We knew that if they did that, it would set the horses racing. We couldn’t do this piecemeal. We had to deal with the whole thing.
Luminous: What were some of the challenges when creating the new brand?
Erica: The biggest challenge was the worry that we would lose brand equity in our portfolio of brands, and that by trying to shift to a simplified model that we would lose customer loyalty and recognition. We also had lots of discussions over whether we could lose the colour red. One of our brands had a very strong red, and could we ever contemplate losing that? IMI’s core brand was blue, which is a very engineering colour, and there was a lot of nervousness about not being blue and how much other people care about our name and colours.
You can go round in circles on that and people really worried. There was also lots of worry that our employees would have loyalty to their brand and that they wouldn’t go on the journey with us. But thankfully, employees have been amazing and they’ve loved the rebrand. I think everyone needed it. It wasn’t a worry that came to fruition in the end, but it dominated the early conversations.
Luminous: A few years on from launch, how would you describe the impact of the rebrand?
Erica: Internally it’s helped to break down silos. People were in their own world and by taking all of that out, we’ve been able to drive a one-IMI approach to processes. I don’t know if that’s something I expected, but it’s helped drive simplification through the business and it’s easier for people internally to understand IMI.
Externally it’s made our narrative to investors and customers much clearer. Because of how complicated we were, you had to work much harder to understand who we are and what we do. We used to spend the first 10 or 20 minutes of new customer meetings explaining who we are and the complicated divisions and brands.
We make products, but also a huge part of what we do is solutions. We’re exposed to three big global megatrends: energy, automation, and healthcare. Today, the IMI brand is much more about deep applications engineering expertise and solutions in those areas. That’s quite different to focusing on a product brand. IMI is a great business, it’s doing really well, it’s got a great culture and it’s modern in lots of ways. The brand now reflects that.
Luminous: In your opinion, what does it take to develop a strong corporate brand?
Erica: I think as much as possible, simplicity. In all companies, there’s lots going on internally, but you want to make it as simple as you can for the outside world to understand your business
Luminous: What would be your advice to a business that is about to go through a rebrand?
Erica: I think doing lots of pre-work before. We did some analysis in the lead-up to deciding whether we would do the rebrand and the problems we were trying to solve.
The exam question for me was: how do we want IMI to look in 10 years’ time? Because if we don’t have that goal, we’ll never get there. You can’t really rebrand without an end vision. So really understanding where you want to get to. I think getting the exec alignment early on about why we’re doing this is key.
And then as you go through, as we did with Luminous, everyone gets a lot more comfortable. We had monthly meetings, to get through that process, and it takes people on a real journey. It’s such a cliché, but it really does. If we’d started out and said, we want to rebrand, no one would have ever agreed.
Originally, we said we’d make everything the same colour blue. But as we got more into it, we just kept asking questions. If you jump to, we’re going to do this, this and this, it’s harder for people to agree. We did it properly because we did it slowly and asked all those questions. It’s about having that open-mindedness.
Rebrands aren’t easy. There’s still bits of old things that haven’t been rebranded yet. It’s definitely a process. But our employees grabbed it and ran with it, which made it a lot easier as well.
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