Legrand, a leading French supplier of electrical components and networking solutions, had acquired, over time, seven businesses in North America. Each one a storied commercial brand – names like Pass & Seymour, Wiremold and Ortronics. The seven units were discrete, not clearly tied to the Legrand parent.

While the company had achieved good returns on its investments, the CEO, John Selldorff, wanted to take the company Legrand to a new level. His vision: to improve its market position and fuel growth across multiple business units and product lines.

Centering on the customer

The journey, however, was a challenging one. Legrand faced structural issues in its brand portfolio, channels and sales. The Legrand brand itself was relatively weak in the North American market. From the outside, the various businesses looked and operated like different companies. The customer experience across channels was disjointed.

Tenet Partners was brought on board to help the company pursue its mission of building a new, customer-focused brand platform. That would involve optimizing the brand portfolio in the context of customer experience, positioning Legrand for the future and articulating new value propositions to sales channel partners, influencers and end customers.

Using a brand-led approach for framing Legrand’s business strategy and activating organizational change, our team of strategists acted as a catalyst to lead the transformation.

A 360° view of the brand

To uncover innovation opportunities, Tenet conducted extensive qualitative and quantitative research with external audiences. Our teams met with distributors, contractors, specifiers and end customers in commercial and retail markets. The goal: to fully understand perceptions, customer experiences and identify unmet needs. This provided a solid grasp of the brand.

The external research was paired with several months of internal collaboration. A series of co-creation workshops offered the opportunity to dive deep with Legrand teams, spanning all areas and levels of the company. These workshops helped craft and evaluate options, frame recommendations and define future projects.

The outcome was a simple but powerful strategic approach:

• The company would unite under the Legrand master brand.
• Five of the seven existing companies were de-branded and their names applied to their product lines.
• The remaining two brands were retained as separate business units to address discrete specialty markets and customer segments.

Capturing the essence – and promise – of Legrand

Realigning the brand portfolio was a huge step forward for Legrand. Finding a way to telegraph its importance was next on the list.

A new brand promise, Designed to be better, served as the internal rallying cry and codified the value that employees deliver in all their efforts. This differentiated brand promise and Legrand’s emphasis on customer experience underscored how success was going to be achieved.

For customers, the promise encapsulated the value of Legrand products and solutions into a single expression. The company is positioned as the provider of highly functional technology and aesthetically pleasing design treatments for the office and home.

Success comes from clarity of purpose

Legrand’s customer experience-focused repositioning program illustrates how brand serves as a powerful leadership tool. It’s been lauded by management as instrumental to their remarkable accomplishments in the years following the launch.

Since the program went live, Legrand has taken significant market share in the commercial and residential construction markets. It has also gained the confidence to open up new markets focused on technology.

Being clear about who you are, what your company promises and guiding everyone towards a shared vision is what helped Legrand create competitive advantage, connect with customers and drive growth.