Visualize the conglomerates strategy
The shared base of the conglomerate consists in high technical, procedural and international marketing know how.
The brand strategy had to establish a strong visual coherence between the divisions. A system of umbrella brand and a series of subbrands was created. The task was handled as a project management at MetaDesign Suisse AG.
Creation of an umbrella brand concept
The point of departure was to define the family brands core values. They were distilled by a inhouse market research and with a series of interviews within the Bucher clientele. An internationally applicable claim was invented: "Simply great machines".
The logo had been developed by small steps over the last 200 years. By another redesign it was shaped more elegantly without loosing its power.
Brand architecture
In a second step the brand architecture was defined. The conglomerates holding uses the familiy brand and Bucher-Municipal, Bucher Process, Bucher-Vaslin und Bucher-Hydraulics are subbrands strongly attached to the umbrella brand. The Kuhn brand beeing stronger in its markets than Bucher as a manufacturer of agricultural machinery was left as a stand alone brand. Emhart Glass instead, also a very powerful brand in its very limited B2B market took the endorsment "a BUCHER Company“.
A third element of the project consisted in design guidelines for communications like websites, brochures, annual reports, product flyers, customer magazines, trade fair stalls, exterior signage etc.
The imagery was a very important issue. A very high level imagery should project the high level of the Bucher products. A top photographer was commissioned to shoot a series of catchy pictures to build up a stock of adequate pictures in the company's image bank. Imagery is a key issue in communications because images communicate non verbally much faster than any written statements.
The Bucher conglomerate started 1807 as a small forge near Zurich. It mainly manufactured agricultural machinery.
In 2007 it celebrated its 200 years of existence. It is one of the oldest Swiss industrial company.
For a long time Bucher grew slowely. Kuhn was acquired in 1946. In the eighties of the last century several important acquisitions were made. Today Bucher has four divisions with a turnover of about two to three billions Swiss francs.
Of the 6000 employees roughly 85 % work outside of Switzerland at many subsidiaries around the world.