Alfa Laval: Developing a new core story

Alfa Laval is a global industrial company headquartered in Lund, Sweden, with more than 20,000 employees worldwide. The company was experiencing rapid growth and was meeting new customers and partners who were not already familiar with the company or its products and solutions. This growth also created a need for a stronger employer brand to attract and retain employees. Therefore, Alfa Laval wanted to develop a new core story.

The challenge was to identify what was common for a company that provides solutions for three very different industries: Energy, Food & Water and Marine. Although Alfa Laval is a global market leader in several of its core areas, there were also major differences in Alfa Laval’s position in the different markets.

In the first half of the project, RelationsPeople conducted a meta-analysis of all previous core narratives and other strategic formulations, competitor positions, and recent analyses of the company’s culture and customers. RelationsPeople then conducted a large number of qualitative interviews with top executives in Alfa Laval’s global organization. Based on the analysis of this extensive data, RelationsPeople, in collaboration with Alfa Laval’s Vice President of Communications, developed the recommendation for a position that was both authentic and attractive to internal and external stakeholders across the three industries.

In the second half of the project, RelationsPeople developed a core story consisting of several different parts. The core story was qualified in a process over several months through a co-creation process in the form of meetings and workshops with the future users of the platform in Alfa Laval’s global organization: Leaders in Communication, Investor Relations, Human Resources, Marketing and Sustainability. The Group Management Team adopted the final version based on the recommendation from Communication.

The result was a multi-part core story with the headline Pioneering Positive Impact and a messaging platform that made it easy to communicate the essence of Alfa Laval in practice. Pioneering Positive Impact expressed Alfa Laval’s strong position and visionary contribution to the green transition across the three industries. Another result was a rapid implementation of the core story in all functional areas. This was made possible by the co-creation process, where future users had contributed to the development. The implementation process is deeply rooted in a project office and a branding academy that is used to roll out all the elements, including a new visual identity.

RelationsPeople has since worked with the functional leaders at Alfa Laval to integrate Pioneering Positive Impact into Alfa Laval’s employer branding platform, sustainability communication platform and deep into the business in customized versions of the core narrative.