Creative Inc / Irish Graphic Design, Branding and Advertising

NOONAN

Best known for its contract cleaning business, NOONAN has diversified its service offering into other areas including security, pest control etc and currently employs approx 6000 full-time and part-time person throughout the island of Ireland and the UK. While its diversification into areas like security has been successful in part, it has not achieved the scale it was looking for through organic growth.

In 2009, the Newcourt Group went into administration, which presented NOONAN with the opportunity to acquire Federal (Ireland’s largest security company, approx 2000 employees).

Creative Inc was employed initially to review the strategy for the brand and how best the acquisition could proceed from a brands perspective. The first phase involved working with the senior management team in NOONAN (CEO, board of directors, Alchemy who own NOONAN) and agreeing which brand structure best worked with their objectives for the acquisition and plans to grow the business. Out of 5 possible structures, it was agreed that all their services and businesses, including Federal, should come under a new and repositioned NOONAN brand identity.

An important element in ensuring the success of this new thinking, would be the buy-in of both NOONAN and Federal employees. A brand workshop was conducted whereby all the senior management were brought through a process of understanding and collaboration and as part of the session we developed a programme titled “the heroic journey” whereby each of the participants charted the journey / life of both NOONAN and Federal, their “marriage” and life together going forward. At the end of the workshop we had unity and clarity of purpose and thinking and full agreement and support for the new structure and naming, NOONAN.

One of the first major commercial objectives for the brand was well on its way to being achieved i.e. buy-in and support from senior management, especially from Federal.

The final part of our research involved mapping this internal thinking onto the external perception to see if there were any gaps in our logic. We interviewed approximately 30 of NOONAN’s and Federal’s top customers (Wyeth, Iarnrod Eireann, Dundrum Town Centre etc) to ensure that there would be no fundamental objections to the new proposed offering from the market and also to start the external buy-in process. This is critical, as one of the main objectives for the brand project is to ensure that existing clients of Federal are happy to continue their security contracts and renew future ones with NOONAN. That they view NOONAN as a fully integrated soft services company (similar to ISS, OCS) and that they do not view it simply as a contract cleaning company.

The new NOONAN brand identity was launched in June 2010 and works so far have included visualisation of the new brand identity, messaging, design of all their main collateral including very visible elements like their livery, website etc.

The main commercial objectives include protecting their substantial investment in Federal, ensuring employee buy-in, diversifying their services offering, repositioning their business to become Ireland’s largest soft services company and growing sales in a challenging economic environment.