Brand strategy – KADRA – amplifying freedom of movement
Brand strategy is a little understood or even misunderstood term in Romania. I have written about what it is, how to do it, who does it and how not to do it, in about 10 articles here. In short, it is essential. Without it, it’s as if you have the car, the fuel, the driver, the people inside, but no reason to start the journey.
KADRA – and here there is much to say. Above all, they are great people: intelligent, humorous, and genuinely committed to doing things well. They work in access automation, but I honestly believe they could have built airplanes just as well.
How we ended up doing a brand strategy project. The need was first identified in the HR department. The people there needed a higher calling to present to those they were recruiting. It was not enough that they had the most beautiful office building in Cluj, smart colleagues, new company cars, and strong employee benefits; something more was needed. That “something more” is, in fact, the company’s purpose — the meaningful trace it aims to leave behind, its contribution to this world.
Then, the communication department felt the same. They had talked for too many years about solutions; something aspirational was needed as well.
But it didn’t stop there. The people in the board deeply understood the idea of purpose, contribution, and meaning. They knew that shared values keep people together on the same road. They knew that a company’s value is given by its people and by the cohesion among them. They had been through such processes before, not once but several times, in different forms. Moreover, KADRA is one of the few Romanian companies with an intranet — proof of their concern for building a culture, giving people a voice, and putting them in the spotlight.
So, for us, it seemed like a simple project: we just had to help these well-prepared people find their way forward. We were wrong. It was not simple at all; it was very, very hard. We conducted many interviews and one-on-one discussions with KADRA employees — more than forty. We created a working group with the board and other key people in the company. We held a series of working meetings to identify the path forward: what values we believe in as a team, what we offer, why we exist, how we deliver what we promise, what makes us different, and so on. We analyzed many examples, imagined scenarios, debated, and carried out various iterative activities, online and offline, in smaller and larger groups.
After several months of activities, we were unable to find that common path, that polar star that would give meaning to our existence and towards which the machine I was talking about in the introduction would start. We could not see the light at the end of the tunnel, we were revolving around the same ideas that the organization had been consuming in all the more than 30 years of its existence.
The solution came from the courage to take the road, the courage to simplify. The answer was so simple that today you almost can’t say KADRA without saying “amplify freedom in motion“. Based on this North Star, we created a system. To sustain it, we not only redefined the values, we created a series of activities to give them meaning and to make people realize that they are their own, that we extracted them from them. We have clarified who KADRA is, what it does, why it exists, how it comes to create impact, how it is different, what specific elements of a person could be attributed to it, how it supports the contribution it aspires to and how it gives meaning to the group’s existence. We theorized and then created a plan for propagation in the company, which the HR, Marketing, HR teams, the board and the ambassadors of this transformation took forward.
No, it wasn’t a rebranding. It was a transformation – what a rebranding should be, even in Romania. How is it today, 2 years after this initiative? The transformation continues. We are now trying to build an expression at the organizational level, to harmonize at the group level what we theorized. The good thing is that people inside and outside are linking this organization – KADRA – to its purpose: “amplify freedom on the move”. And that gives it strength and meaning.
And another thing: KADRA just got a lot easier to explain. We are professionals and passionate about technology. We integrate complete access management and automation solutions. We configure traffic in the spaces around us, prioritizing the safety and convenience of each individual. We enhance people’s freedom of movement. We believe in a sustainable future where every individual can enjoy comfort and safety, in a world where obstacles no longer exist because everything around us opens automatically when needed. We believe that such a world can only be realized if we actively work to enhance every individual’s freedom of movement.
And last but not least, we have created a brand book to inspire and guide our colleagues, new and old.