Over the years, Navistar’s offerings had sprawled to encompass new business opportunities, resulting in a wide-ranging brand portfolio that did not always reflect customer needs. To realize the organization’s ambition of moving from being a commercial vehicle manufacturer to a mobility solutions provider, Navistar’s brand architecture needed to be assessed, streamlined, and above all — unified.

Leveraging our analysis of the corporate and portfolio brands and the effects of International’s renewed role as master brand, we developed a digital and social media strategy to support the new portfolio structure.

Turning to the digital space, we documented, categorized, and assessed the brand’s expansive set of customer-facing websites, filtering our insights through the lens of the new master brand strategy and brand architecture.

With a clear path forward, we streamlined domains, migrated relevant content to the new international.com, and developed new content to communicate the transformed brand — including reframing existing product brands as International offerings.

The same careful attention to detail was used to map the company’s web of former group and product brand social media accounts across all platforms to assess their performance and explore which should be closed or merged, in line with the new brand strategy. We also developed a tactical plan to achieve this, based on each platform's rules and specifications with regards to management of followers and existing content.

Aligned on the channels, we crafted the social media playbook, an all-encompassing guide to help International optimize its presence and increase engagement across channels and within respective markets. An essential resource, it provides best practices, strategies, content themes and illustrative posts, and actionable insights to engage audiences, build the brand, and drive meaningful interactions.

International needed to define a space for itself that would set the brand apart from industry peers and lay a strong strategic foundation for the road ahead.

Getting there meant grounding in something authentic and differentiating. Using what we’d learned from interviews with employees, dealers, customers and drivers, we crafted a positioning rooted in International’s relentless commitment to driving its customers’ businesses forward, no matter where they were starting from. The positioning also honored the company’s signature combination of determination and innovation, which made their partnership capabilities all the more impactful.

A brand platform is an exercise in focus: capturing the absolute essence of a brand and nothing else. Once we were able to define it for International, it became far easier to explain to people, from dealers and partners to fleet owners and drivers, what they could expect from the company going forward. It also set expectations for employees, helping them to grasp what they would need to deliver on — day in and day out — to bring the new International to life.

The brand platform was reinforced with a comprehensive verbal identity, drawing on International’s confidence and bravery in the face of two-centuries of continuous innovation. More than a matter of consistency, the verbal identity provides teams and partners with an ownable and memorable way to communicate the new brand.