Ecolab, with the recent purchase of Nalco, is an $11b company with operations in 160 different countries, spanning 15+ different business divisions.  From keeping our food supplies safe to cleaning up toxic oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico, Ecolab does it all.  As such, there is a challenge to present a unified brand image and message to the outside world.

As the lead brand and design agency for Ecolab, we were tasked with implementing a new digital experience for ecolab.com.  Having recently reshaped and reworked with overall corporate brand experience, we carefully translated that to the digital world.  The dot-com site had to align several disparate business units while maintaining the higher-level brand story.  We architected and designed a system which allowed for distributed content editing and updating, while maintaining overall creative control and workflow.

Rather than focus on the product/service divisions, we selected a strategy to focus on the end-customer benefit and the higher purpose of the company – encompassing four pillars: keeping food supplies safe, preventing infection, energy production and sustaining earth’s resources.  By shifting the strategy to the four core purposes, we were able to align all businesses together under one umbrella.

We developed extensive user personas to help guide our design and development process.  We ultimately were able to narrow each user segment down to functional roles within a company, creating 7 different potential user groups.  Using this as a baseline, we started to think about the workflow and governance of the Web site.  How would a company as large and diverse as Ecolab continue to maintain an active digital presence without a dedicated digital team?

We designed a workflow to work inside of a content management system to allow distributed content editing and production, helping to maintain editorial control, but still allowing each division access to update content.  Through a series of web training seminars (hosted by myself), we were able to train the internal marketing teams not only how to write for the web, but also how to edit content, select appropriate images and lay a strategic plan for future upgrades.

Role(s):

Creative Director / Designer / Copywriter / Strategist / IA

Team:

Daniele Lanza – Art Director/Designer
Ivan Nunez – IA