Legrand

A comprehensive brand restructuring helped French electrical components company Legrand grab North American market share – even during the worst of a steep downturn in the marketplace.

Legrand is a model of how to achieve success as a conglomerate. Over time, it had acquired several businesses in North America, each operating under its own brand. While the company had achieved solid growth, the CEO wanted to take the company to a new level. His vision was to increase the cross-selling of Legrand’s multiple product lines.

However, the structure of both the brands and their sales forces was an impediment. Each of the existing brands had strong equity, while the parent brand was weaker by comparison. From the outside, Legrand looked like several different companies.

Legrand partnered with Brandlogic to solve the dilemma. We developed a fact-based brand strategy covering brand portfolio optimization, overall repositioning, end-user and channel partner value propositions, and related messaging.

To anchor and inform the strategic thinking, Brandlogic conducted qualitative and quantitative brand equity and purchase driver research with customers, as well as internal stakeholders. A series of co-creation workshops, held over several months with executives from across all the businesses, helped craft and evaluate options and frame recommendations.

The outcome is a unified Legrand brand. Five of the seven existing companies were de-branded, while retaining their names for product lines. The new brand architecture retains two of the existing brands to address discrete specialty markets.

The reorganization enables a consolidation of sales forces, allowing greater concentration on cross-selling to large commercial and residential builders, as well as retail customers. This was the key to realizing the CEO’s strategic vision.

The success of the program from Brandlogic is undeniable. Legrand took market share during a steep downturn in the commercial and residential construction markets and did so against many well-established competitors.