Reimagining Condé Nast International’s Brand

Road to the Next StepGuest post by Barney Larkin, Further, 11 March 2019

Using online communities to create a shared global vision and mission with employees.

Reimagining mission and vision statements is a tough challenge, even for small organisations. So, if you’re one of the world’s most successful publishing companies, where do you begin?

Condé Nast International sets the benchmark for publishing excellence with leading print and digital brands including Vogue, Vanity Fair, GQ, Wired, and AD among others. They reached out to Further to help define their new mission and vision statement.

We designed and moderated a series of online communities in Brazil, Germany, France, Taiwan, Japan and Mexico, hosted on our Together research platform. We used group discussions, surveys, image sourcing, storytelling and projective techniques. We had one week to have conversations with 60 employees, all with different titles and levels of seniority, across six countries in different languages.

Heather Williams, Further’s Business Development Director, explains “We surfaced staff perceptions of Condé Nast International as a global employer, a place of work and a consumer brand, in a non-hierarchical environment. We unpicked the opportunities around brand equity, product quality and corporate culture, then gathered feedback on potential mission and vision statements. We focused on what needed to be emphasised and what the meaningful semantic differences were between languages and cultures. Finally, we worked with staff to refine and build on the potential mission and vision statements to ensure they were grounded in the heritage of the business and distinctive for all stakeholders. I think we managed to reveal the heart and soul of Condé Nast International in quite a short time frame.”

Further and Condé Nast International have produced a full case study available here.