NORDEN

Challenge

NORDEN is one of Denmark’s biggest and oldest shipping companies, and one that has made its name by being an innovator in the industry. This drive to constantly develop their offering led NORDEN to shift their focus from owning of ships to the more agile business of also operating them. This new model required additional new types of workforce – one that had more in common with the trading floor than the dockside. This shift started a schism within the firm where old- and new-school sensibilities struggled to find a common identity.

Our challenge was to create a new brand story that would reflect NORDEN’s transformation into an asset-light, asset trading focused company – celebrating the new, progressive and differentiating characteristics that were shaping NORDEN’s future while ensuring the value of the traditional shipping skills that were still vital to the firm’s success were represented.

The new brand story would be brought to life through a number of tangible assets such as a new corporate visual identity, and website design.

Method

From the conclusion of our very first meeting with the NORDEN C-Suite, we got a sense the firm was defined by dichotomy: the old versus the new, intuition versus analysis, data versus experience. But we instinctively felt that, rather than being something that should be forced into a single, monolithic ideology, the differences within the culture at NORDEN we’re actually where their unique strength was to be found. Our hypothesis was that it was the synergy between all the different types of intelligence found in their workforce that made NORDEN so successful.

In order to test this theory, we conducted a research project where we interviewed NORDEN employees from all over the world working in various roles, as well as partners and other external stakeholders. After hours of conversations and analysis, we concluded that our hunch was correct and that many of the success stories at NORDEN relied heavily on a broad array of competencies and attitudes.

This extensive research quickly led to a creative solution that we felt had the power to unite the company and galvanise it in its path to success.

Solution

The new NORDEN brand story centred on one keyword that acted as a fulcrum that would allow us to leverage the variety of skills, knowledge and experience that NORDEN had accrued over the last 150 years. That word was ‘intelligence’. Intelligence in all it’s different forms, from the rational, left-brained intelligence of its analysts to the emotional, instinctive intelligence of those that had earned a reputation of trust through personal relationships with clients. It allowed us to talk about the skills of the data scientist, the port captain, the project manager and the charterers with one simple word.

We refined this concept into a tagline that pitched the intelligence NORDEN possesses against the value it delivers – which in a volatile and unpredictable business like shipping, is trust. And so, TRUST POWERED BY INTELLIGENCE became basis of the brand platform. A platform that could be supported by showcasing the many success stories that we had discovered during our interviews.