Holcim: putting one name on a company two countries had built
Holcim, the Switzerland-based building materials group, had acquired Canada’s St. Lawrence Cement and needed a single name and a single story for a business whose employees still worked for two different companies. Working as part of SFP’s team in Toronto in 2009, I led the brand strategy, narrative development and portfolio architecture. Holcim has continued to grow in Canada since, and today operates more than 400 sites nationally with over 6,900 employees.
Client: Holcim · Sector: Premium B2B — building materials manufacturing · Market: Canada, part of a global group · Year: 2009 · Agency partner: SFP, Toronto · My role: Brand strategy · Services: Brand strategy, narrative development, brand architecture
The problem
A name change after an acquisition is rarely a naming problem. St. Lawrence Cement had a long Canadian history and employees who identified with it; Holcim had a global system to run. The result was internal confusion about who people now worked for and what the combined company was for, which made consistent expansion harder than the commercial logic suggested it should be.
What I found
The gap between the two companies wasn’t commercial. It was cultural, and it was measurable. I ran a Hofstede analysis across both sides and the picture was consistent: the Swiss organisation planned in decades, wrote things down, and expressed respect through precision. The Canadian organisation worked informally, asked questions upward without ceremony, and measured progress in months.
Neither is wrong, but the same document reads differently on each side of the Atlantic. A hundred-page policy manual is reassurance in Zurich and occupation in Ontario. So the deliverable that mattered most was not the narrative itself but a short list of dos and don’ts for the people who would deliver it: open with warmth before rules, explain why anything is changing, name the wins arriving in three to six months rather than only the ones arriving in ten years, and appear on video rather than behind long emails. And above all, avoid the sentence “this is how we do it now” — the four words most likely to turn an acquisition into an occupation.
What I did
I built the brand strategy for the transition and developed the narrative that explained the change to the people it affected most — employees first, customers second — together with the cultural communication guidance that governed how it was delivered. I then organised the portfolio so that it was clear how the operations, products and inherited names related to one another, and how future additions should be handled.
Why it mattered
Post-acquisition branding is a stakeholder problem wearing a naming problem’s clothes. Everyone can agree on the facts of the merger and still disagree about the story, and until the story is settled the integration stalls. This is one of the two briefs agencies most often bring me: many stakeholders, one account of what the company now is.
Brand architecture after an acquisition is one of the briefs agencies most often hand me. See how the partnership works.