The NIPSEA Group
Paint & Coating Branding: NIPSEA - Innovation with heart and people at our core
In 1962 Nippon Paint took their first step outside Japan through a joint venture with Singapore's Wuthelam Holdings. Today the NIPSEA Group is in 19 countries, employing over 22,000 people with over 83 manufacturing facilities, producing over 1.3 billion liters of paints & coatings annually. The NIPSEA Group is Asia Pacific’s No. 1 paint and coatings manufacturer in both production and sales revenue.
Much of the success of NIPSEA Group can be attributed to their regionalization strategy. A strategy that gave each market autonomy to tailor their offers to the needs of that particular market. With management’s vision to expand beyond Asia it became important to align the group behind a shared promise.
Tangible engaged management and staff from all regions and all levels, as well as customers across all six key divisions. Our research covered many facets of the business and enabled us to better understand perceptions and preferences, as well as potential areas of alignment and areas to acknowledge regional variation. From this it became clear that customer centric innovation and customer service were the key to the Nippon Paint / 立邦 brand. This led to brand promise of: Innovation with heart and people at our core.
Marketing & Communications
Research allowed us to better understand the visual equities that were strong in different markets for Nippon Paint / 立邦. Tangible could then create a refreshed set of Visual and Verbal Core Elements across the group. The Nippon Paint / 立邦 logo was very subtly refined and rolled out across the sub-brands and segment brands. A Verbal Identity was crafted for the group using Core Values to shape the messaging, together with a group tagline of; “Inspired by you”, which was then adapted for different scenarios. The Visual Core Element system was designed to reflect the preferred personality of ‘friendly, warm and caring’ across both the Trade Use (TU) and Industrial Use (IU) sectors.
People & Culture
The NIPSEA Group had developed an internal brand initiative to align and inspire staff behind key behavioral characteristics. The branding project enabled Tangible to review this initiative and align the external brand values with a new set of internal brand values under the banner of ‘Lean for Growth’
Products & Services
Tangible tested different brand architecture scenarios as well as alternatives for product and innovation categorization. This allowed us to better understand how to frame The NIPSEA Group’s different capabilities and offers, from both an internal and external perspective, before making recommendations to senior management
