TENCEL™ Brand Activation

Redefining a world-leading brand of botanic fibers

Botanic fiber producer Lenzing, well established as an innovator and sustainability leader in the cellulosic fiber industry, saw strong consumer orientation as the key to unlocking potential future growth. With a winning product lineup and a powerful sustainability message able to resonate with today’s environmentally conscious consumers, Lenzing sought to evolve from a B2B business strategy to “B2Me”. This would mean pursuing a B2B2C approach in order to gain end customer recognition – in Lenzing’s words, “looking beyond the fiber to the lifestyle it unlocks”. At the same time Lenzing wanted to rationalize their diffuse brand architecture and better protect their valuable trademarks.

Lenzing engaged Base Creative as the global brand activation agency for this transition. We worked closely with Lenzing’s Global Brand Marketing team and business segment heads, developing a multidisciplinary strategy to refine and activate this large-scale redefinition of an already strong brand. With our support, Lenzing took the opportunity to re-examine their brand architecture and reposition their Modal fiber offerings under their respected TENCEL™ branding, previously reserved for Lyocell, making TENCEL™ an umbrella brand for Lenzing’s premium fibers. This move was intended to facilitate the new business strategy by seeking to establish TENCEL™ as a recognized ingredient brand in the end consumer market, while retaining and strengthening its reputation among primary customers (spinners and fabric makers). To achieve this, we worked with Lenzing to standardize all the claims made for their TENCEL™ fibers, and to generate an entirely fresh set of marketing materials for the brand and its various branded offers.

This TENCEL™ project was run in parallel with two other related major projects on which we supported Lenzing: to similarly redefine their nonwoven offerings under a new brand name, VEOCEL™, and their industrial offerings under the LENZING™ name. A related Base Creative project developed the branding for Lenzing’s new luxury lyocell filament, branded TENCEL™ Luxe, while another project addressed a further Lenzing fiber brand, EcoVero™. Across all these projects, substantial emphasis was placed on the sustainability of Lenzing’s fibers.

2

years of work

6

sub-brands developed to address different market segments

50

million swing tags in the market

What we did

In one of the largest projects ever undertaken by Base Creative, we first built on some initial strategy work to help Lenzing define the value proposition for the TENCEL™ brand and develop positioning statements, then to generate agreed and verified claims for Lenzing’s TENCEL™ offerings and to translate these into claim books. On the visual side, we worked on the brand grid and updated TENCEL’s brand identity. The claims and visuals produced served as the foundation for developing subsequent materials: branding guides for the company’s licensees advising them on how to use the identity and the claims; a brand toolkit; and numerous marketing collaterals for every touchpoint, including brochures and leaflets, videos, hang tags for garments incorporating TENCEL™ fibers, and a new TENCEL™ website. Finally we organized a high-profile launch event in Paris – the world’s fashion capital – to bring the revamped brand into the spotlight.

Research and Insights

Combined Brand Strategy and Business Strategy

Brand Identity

Marketing Communications

Brand Activation

Research and Insights

The project required us to understand the brand and the business as well as the goals of the business unit heads and the company’s sustainability positioning. As we were undertaking a B2Me campaign, we also needed to understand the consumer mindset. using various methods of research, we homed in on who we were going to reach and how we were going to reach them, advising Lenzing on the appropriate marketing tools to address customers’ growing environmental awareness and preference for comfort. In the course of the project, we studied a number of leading ingredient brands[RP1] and benchmarked against them.

Combined Brand Strategy and Business Strategy

Base Creative helped refine and expand Lenzing’s new brand strategy and extended it to all the touchpoints required to successfully activate the redefined brand. Considerable effort was expended on working with different teams in Lenzing to define a set of claims for TENCEL™ fibers – verified as accurate and free of legal risk – which would serve as the foundation of all marketing materials. In addition to the fibers themselves, we helped Lenzing to name and define claims for several key technologies applied to the fibers to enhance desired characteristics such as softness and color fastness. The objective was to narrow TENCEL™ fibers down to the benefits that mattered to customers, cutting away distractions from the key message. In using these claims to copywrite all the subsequent collaterals, a key challenge for Base Creative was to create writing that balanced technical precision with broad customer appeal.

The TENCEL™ brand story, as developed, was one of natural comfort – fibers that appealed to eco-conscious consumers by combining superior environmental sustainability, through their botanic origin and eco-friendly production processes, with long-lasting softness, strength and versatility. This brand personality was extended into a number of branded offers for different market segments – TENCEL™ Denim, TENCEL™ Intimate, TENCEL™ Active, and TENCEL™ Home – and corresponding focused variants of the claims developed for each. An insight-driven overarching slogan, feels so right, was developed and variations of this produced for each branded offer – addressing emotional consumer needs to look good, feel good and do good.

Brand Identity

With some visual elements predefined, Base Creative refined and extended the brand’s look and feel to develop a range of materials revolving around the brand story of nature and comfort. Ensuring cohesive key messages, active visual prototyping always ran parallel with strategic thought.

A brand grid incorporating Lenzing’s Thread of Life motif ensured continuity and cohesion, complemented by a green-based color scheme and appropriate fonts to reflect nature and gentleness, with a recurring forest theme and visual portrayals of how wood is turned into fibers and then to fabrics. With an uncluttered minimalist aesthetic and “everyday epic” photographic style to keep the focus on benefits of the brand, we produced a wide spectrum of marketing materials for the brand as a whole and for individual branded offers. To make sure this focus was never lost, we worked closely with TENCEL™ to align and distinguish the new direction with that of its parent brand, LENZING™. Icons were developed to symbolize key benefits and used across the entire range of marketing collaterals. Their use was later extended into the VEOCEL™ and LENZING™ Industrial projects to maintain alignment.

Marketing Communications

With the brand’s marketing claims and visual style determined, a major part of our work was to bring these together into a full range of marketing collaterals. On top of a claim book for Lenzing’s internal reference, our extensive output at this stage included brand guidelines for licensees, brochures and leaflets, videos, redesigned multilingual swing tags, a B2B brand toolkit summarizing key elements of the brand, a new TENCEL™ website, a trade show booth design system, and print advertising for both B2B and B2C. We expanded the original photo library with dedicated shoots, particularly for B2C marketing.

Brand Activation

We made sure to cover all bases, using these marketing materials across numerous channels to help Lenzing express the TENCEL™ brand at every touchpoint, from digital marketing to trade shows to newly shot brand and segment videos and redesigned segment brochures to mass advertising. Instore POS materials were complemented by a retailer education program, while efforts were also made to reach key influencers such as trade and fashion columnists. The TENCEL™ website was optimized for both B2B and B2C customers. The “feels so right” campaign was first launched in Turkey and Japan through cobranding partnerships and key influencer engagement, and further cobranding partnerships are being developed. Results of all these activities were monitored via appropriate analytics.

Our efforts culminated in a high profile European launch event which we organized at Palais Brongniart in Paris in February 2018. Featuring a fashion/dance show and supermodel Arizona Muse, this well-received production was attended by key Lenzing customers and trade media, bringing the redefined brand to the attention of market leaders.