EssilorLuxottica

Internal Brand Launch

The Setup: The Hardest Part is Getting Together

Mergers are notoriously difficult. Studies show that they may fail between 70% and 90% of the time. For very large companies, the stakes can be enormous. Names like Daimler and Chrysler, AOL and Time Warner, HP and Compaq all come up when two giants consider tying the knot. While market, financial, and operational aspects are always important, those are points most likely to be solved - they are easily measured and tracked. Much more difficult are the more immeasurable aspects: people and culture.

The Players: The Italian and French

In 2017 Essilor and Luxottica began one such megamerger, involving two global companies dominant in their industries.

On one side was Essilor, a company with more than a hundred years of history, maker of sophisticated optical lenses and equipment. Essilor as an organization is deeply committed to its mission, spending hundreds of millions of Euros every year on research and development, with half of its employees shareholders in the company, and dozens of philanthropic programs around the world to make eyesight available for everyone.

Luxottica is an Italian eyewear conglomerate, the largest company in the eyewear industry. Founded in 1961, The company started out as a small workshop and today designs, manufactures, distributes and retails its eyewear brands around the world. Its best known brands are Lenscrafters, Lens Hut, Costa, Ray-Ban, Persol, and Oakley. It also sunglasses and prescription frames for designer brands you might have heard of: Chanel, Prada, Giorgio Armani, Burberry, Versace, Dolce and Gabbana, Michael Kors, and Coach.

With the research showing that employee buy-in was going to be crucial, we looked at how we could equip people in the organization for their changing environment. How could we help Essilor's committed employees understand and appreciate their new combined family?

For the Head: Informational Website

Simply explaining the changes is not enough, they'll also want to know the new partner. As we've seen, it can be tough enough to know your own company. So we created a website specifically for Essilor employees to showcase Luxottica. We paid specific attention to the mission and values of the company.

While both companies may see different from the outside, they had a lot in common regarding their scale, mission, products, and priorities. Both companies are committed to tackling the largely unreported global epidemic of myopia, or shortsightedness, which has doubled among young people within a single generation. The more you learned, the more the merger made sense.

For the Heart: Leadership and Mission Videos

No matter how much information you deliver, people will still have questions. The reason for that is often not factual - it's emotional. Helping people feel comfortable and confident about their changing world requires open and confident communication from the top of the organization on down. How will it feel to these two companies united?

The solution was video to tell the story. This started with a multi-day shoot in a global city that wasn't the companies' Milan and Paris hometowns: New York City. We joined Hubert Sagnières, Essilor’s chairman and chief executive on a tour of Luxottica brand locations as well as the independent eyecare professionals that will also benefit from the products of the newly combined company. Sagnières was able to communicate details, but also his absolute enthusiasm for the company and the future.

The footage we captured in New York was then combined with footage from Essilor and Luxtottica's efforts around the world, putting paid to the concepts Sagnières described. Videos were used for training, AGMs, and other events.