Puma Energy’s process of consolidation was completed with a photography-centric rebrand. Andrew Thomas explores its new branding

As a company that had grown by acquisition, Puma Energy was experienced in the rebranding process. A midstream (storage and distribution) and downstream (retail and wholesale) oil company, Puma had bought many retail petrol outlets from the likes of BP, Texaco and Chevron, rebranding them with the Puma Energy signage. However in 2011, the company was midway through a major expansion and yet completely lacked a sense of brand cohesion on the corporate level.

Over the past three years, Puma, founded in 1997 and acquired by global commodity group Trafigura in 2000, had grown from a $5.8 billion business in 2011 to $8.7 billion in 2012 and is forecast to break the $12 billion mark this year. In that time, its operations spread from 20 countries to 38, its head count increased from 3,800 to 6,000. It had acquired BP’s operations in southern Africa, Exxon’s storage capabilities in Latin America, and all of Chevron in the Caribbean, together with businesses in Asia, Indonesia and Vietnam. These were businesses with strong local identities but even as recently as early 2012 there was no one in the organisation with any kind of brand function who could cohesively consolidate these assets.

Although Puma had a recognisable logo, there was little consistency in its implementation. Different fonts were used and colours, although mainly sticking to a red, green and white palette, had many connotations. The result was a lack of uniformity among the brand assets and no sense of overall corporate brand.

The scale of the problem was immense and in early 2012 Pierre Eladari, Puma’s CEO, appointed Patrick Meyer as head of corporate affairs and marketing. Although an experienced communications professional, Meyer’s background is in financial services, with lengthy stints at Nomura/Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch. Eladari gave Meyer a short brief – he wanted an award-winning corporate brand. And he wanted it soon.

“The excitement for me was that the brand was a blank canvas. There wasn’t a disciplined communications system or a coherent brand experience” says Meyer.

Puma’s annual report process had already begun when Meyer started, and one of his first decisions was to appoint a photographer to capture the true spirit of the organisation for the annual report. Whereas many oil companies would have chosen a conventional corporate photographer, Meyer briefed Jonathan Glynn-Smith, a fashion photographer more used to seeing his work appear in Esquire than in annual reports. Although Glynn-Smith is frequently commissioned by luxury brands such as Hugo Boss and TAG Heuer, the work he produced was instrumental in determining the direction the brand would take.

“I needed to make sure there was proper attention to detail with all the touch-points to all of our audiences,” says Meyer from Puma’s offices in Geneva. “We were approaching our 15th year of operation and yet the business was an untold story. We were operating in over 35 countries, employing all these people, handling over 21 million cubic metres of oil products but you didn’t get a sense this was a global or dynamic organisation. We had an iconic logo, but nobody understood the scale of the business.”

The dynamism that may be lacking in a midstream and downstream oil company can be traced back, in this case, to the origins of the businesses Puma had acquired over the years. These were companies that had built retail and storage networks in the 1950s and 1960s. This was the least glamorous side of the industry and over the years these assets had played minor roles in the profitability of the oil majors. Subsequently they received limited investment.

Puma Energy’s approach was a major gear change to the employees in the newly acquired businesses. As Meyer points out, “A company that comes in and invests in the infrastructure, invests in the technology and invests in the people is transformative to the people in those businesses.”

Those working in the existing operations were used to the methods of the more established companies.

Puma sought to liberate their employees from these more conventional ‘command and control’ structures. Early in the rebrand exercise, Puma recognised that what set the company apart was the encouragement of a pioneering spirit amongst its employees. “We want them to feel that they are pioneers, that they are creating a more adventurous path in a more adventurous company,” Meyer says.

The realisation of this pioneer spirit was the first stage in the articulation of the new brand. But it was once Meyer accompanied Glynn-Davies on his photo shoots that the rest of the brand story started to fall into place.

“The scale of the business is eye opening,” Meyer says. “We supply a number of the landlocked countries in southern Africa and you can watch two to three kilometres of our trucks queuing in Dar es Salaam to refuel and then see 70 to 90 of these trucks driving in convoy to places like Malawi to deliver fuel to keep the mines running and the towns going. You go to the more mature markets like Latin America and you see the level of demand and it’s extraordinary.”

Meyer was struck by the realisation of the role Puma had in these communities and their economies. “Diesel oil is what fuels power stations, taxis, buses, homes, factories and so on. Puma is at the heart of these communities,” he says.

Puma’s growth had seen it increase its role as a key provider to governments, manufacturing companies and the local population. The scale of the company’s operations, the role it was playing in the countries in which it is based, and the pioneering spirit it instilled in its employees beagn to fuel the narrative.

“When I started to look at the contexts in which we operate and I come back to the drawing board, I realised it was pretty clear what we are doing. We’re providing fuel to frontier markets,” Meyer says.

Thus the idea of fuelling frontiers was born and this articulation was carried throughout the brand. The visual identity was also tightened and enforceable brand guidelines implemented.

Puma had already appointed communications agency MerchantCantos to work on the annual report, for which Glynn-Smith’s photographs were originally intended. Suddenly the brief widened and the agency found itself working on the corporate rebrand.

“The photography certainly centred the brand,” recalls Jarrod Comley, MerchantCantos’ creative director. “With it we were able to articulate this sophisticated model on a global scale.”

The ‘fuelling frontiers’ concept has been positioned at the heart of the brand, and has been used in all of Puma’s collateral – for the internal audience and potential employees, the customer audiences and wider stakeholder audiences such as the press and, although unlisted,

City audiences. Despite the ubiquity of this ‘fuelling frontiers’

strapline, neither Comley nor Meyer see it as the final solution to Puma’s brand development. “We see it as organic, Puma can continue to develop a mass of different communication approaches off the back of it,” says Comley.

Meyer agrees that there is potential for organic development in the brand. “For us this was a start rather than a full rebrand,” he says, acknowledging that most companies in Puma’s peer group had reached their current size with a corporate brand already in place.

He also acknowledges the speed with which the process was completed. “We’ve done a three year rebrand project in the space of a year,” Meyer says.

With the rebrand, the annual report, the sustainability report, an employee report and much more collateral produced, MerchantCantos still has a dedicated team working on the Puma account. “Patrick is tremendously energetic. The task we found hardest was keeping up with him. The challenge for us is his pace,” says Comley

Meyer sees the rebrand process as a coming of age for Puma. The collection of assets that Trafigura had acquired, both before and then through Puma, had grown the business exponentially, and yet only through the rebrand does Meyer now think the business has got to the point where Puma Energy can stand on its own feet. With much talk that Trafigura intends to list Puma on the London Stock Exchange, this independence may prove vital. Although Puma deny any such imminent plans, MerchantCantos are quick to point out their credibility of communicating to the City audience.

An IPO would certainly provide a solid test for the rebrand; in the same way that the brand wasn’t born out of focus groups, Puma is light on the metrics and KPIs that test a new brand’s effectiveness.

“We’ve developed a way of bringing our stories together,” says Meyer. “Prior to the rebrand we would go into a meeting and have no way of articulating, for example, our health and safety record. Now we can. We’ve just completed our first sustainability report. The rebrand has brought all our stories together. We’ve moved from having a blank canvas where we had nothing in place and we now have a global coherent communications plan.”

A global, coherent communications plan and a stack of fabulous photos.

Peer review

Dan Vasconcelos, design director, siegel+gale

Photography is such a powerful story-telling tool – it’s great to see it do most of the heavy lifting in a project that has many merits. Looking at Puma’s annual report you can clearly see how it helps to differentiate the company in its sector, convey the sheer scale of their operation and hero the people behind the brand. Bringing in a photographer from a fashion background was a fresh way of achieving this.

It’s interesting to see how the brand idea stems from the photography rather than the opposite. This ‘organic’ approach will require a strong client-side leadership to avoid fragmentation and dilution. I wonder if a concept underpinned by research could have more longevity and relevance?

Implementation costs aside, I can’t help but think that perhaps it’s a missed opportunity that the logo wasn’t addressed here. A logo evolution would have been an effective tool to signal change and further unify the business.

Tony Lorenz, strategy and development director, Endpoint

The global energy market is big business characterised by some truly world-class brands. In this sense, Puma has a lot of catching up to do, but it has taken a rather distinctive approach in creating a brand identity that can grow organically and scale up over time. It astutely identified the importance of cohesive brand communication in the roll out across its corporate channels. Expanding operations from 20 to 38 countries, magnified the challenge to maintain brand consistency.

Puma’a evocative imagery symbolises the company’s commitment to and desire to be at heart of the local communities it serves. The brand identity itself is a clear and simple one. However, the ‘energy’ text below the brand marque is a little small. This could be an issue when the brand is implemented across the varying locations, vehicles, uniforms etc. of its 38 territories. Consistency is everything.

The rebrand has been a smart platform to distill a brand story and unify staff from the different acquisitions behind one vision. One of the implementation challenges, should the brand diversify beyond its current Africa/Asia/Latin American heartland, is how the identity would transpose into Europe and America where the consumer lifestyle brand of the same name is firmly established.