De Beers Brand engagement
| Fact |
Value |
| Contact |
Johannesburg |
| Client |
De Beers |
| Project |
Brand engagement |
| Industry |
Industrial |
| Timeline |
3 Months
Nov 05 - Feb 06 |
| Services |
Behaviour Change
Brand Communications and Collateral
Organisational Development
|
| Team size |
8 The Brand Union
5 Client |
Capturing dreams
Legend has it that the native American dream catcher traps and filters a person’s dreams if you hang it over your bed at night. Bad dreams are caught in the net to disappear with the fading light as the new day dawns, while good dreams are let through. In line with the theme, staff received gifts of custom-made dream catchers, intended to awaken in them a sense of optimism and hope and only "good" dreams.
Born in South Africa, global mining giant De Beers now lives throughout the world. The “I am Diamond” campaign was an internal change management programme, aimed at revolutionising the perceptions and views of its staff worldwide. It also created a revitalised purpose for the company through a fresh vision and values rooted in the heart of De Beers.
Clever, insightful and beautifully executed, the innovation of this identity project lies with the fact that it was born as a language-based concept first, spoken rather than seen Bronwen Rautenbach, Creative Director
The challenge was to penetrate the hearts and minds of staff and to start a conversation with staff in a whole new way. And so, we threw out the traditional top-down approach, creating a brand new flavour of internal communications unique to De Beers that truly spoke to its staff.
Because of the company’s vast structure of the Group, the key to our success lay in identifying a single, unified ‘communication code’ that would access every staff member wherever they worked. This organic code needed to connect staff from all over the world to each other and the organisation. It was also the seed that inspired everything else we did from there.
We began with inspired language as the primary platform for creative direction. The concept was based on the fortuitous ownership of the message “I am” that lives in the word “diamond”. This created the powerful idea “I am diamond”. We then crafted this into “I am Diamond Dream” – the existing internal corporate rallying call and theme for the company’s worldwide staff conference.
Diamonds on the ground
This concept acknowledges that the real ‘diamonds’ in the organisation are its staff. It successfully aligns everyone in the Group under the core element at the heart of De Beers, the diamond.
Diamonds in the sky
A textual component permeated the entire project and breathed life into the creative direction. Based on hand drawings, we conveyed simplistic childlike expressions of hope on blank paper. The aim? To re-engage the dreamer inside every staff member. This magical approach contrasted starkly with the formal blue, white and slick conventions of corporate De Beers.
The concept was extended to an animated hand-drawn film and also applied to print, conference collateral, stationery, “room drops”, interactive emails, teasers and calendars.
Moving away from traditional top-down corporate messaging, we designed an invitation for staff to ‘live the values’ that would inspire in them the right spirit. We achieved this by crystallising the collective company consciousness that contributes to the “dream” of the diamond company. It also captures a personal and pure expression of self-identity.
