strategic brand stewardship
Ventia is a leading essential infrastructure services provider that makes infrastructure work for communities across Australia and New Zealand. The company is an Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) top 200 company, with a secondary listing on New Zealand’s Exchange (NZX) and a workforce of more than 35,000 people.
my role
As senior advisor for brand and marketing at Australian billion-dollar listed company, Ventia, I have been deeply involved in driving and executing brand strategy to anchor a cohesive storytelling across the business - from the greater vision to the individual assets and employee engagement.
Ventia | 2021-2025
/ all work
in this section:
integrated brand portal
digital storytelling across platforms
the challenge
A period of diverse brand expressions from various parts of the business had watered down the usage of the master brand, and new leadership wanted more coherence.
the solution
Mapping and auditing internally used brand marks and working with external designer to develop overarching brand architecture and refreshed brand guidelines. Driving internal communication campaigns to roll out changes and running training workshops for adoption.
highlights
brand guidelines and education
Rolling out updated brand guidelines to a workforce of 35,000 people, we knew that the biggest risk wasn't the guidelines themselves, it was getting our people and all the different teams within the business to actually adopt them.
Rather than a single company-wide announcement, we decided to run smaller dedicated sessions first, tailored to the stakeholder groups most likely to have specific questions: Marketing & Communications, Work Winning, SHEQ, and change communications.
That groundwork meant that by the time the guidelines went wider, the trickiest objections had already been heard and answered, and each stakeholder group felt included and respected in the process - in a sense, already brand advocates, which was really our goal.
the impact
Very positive feedback from stakeholders, expressing how they had a much better understanding of how to use the brand after the workshops.
brand guidelines evolution
brand education
To anchor the updated brand guidelines and give more identification with the master brand, I co-developed the popular ‘brand camps’ - live, company-wide sessions, walking through the brand’s history, its core components and where it was headed with the new guidelines. I wanted to reiterate the vision behind the Ventia brand so everyone felt closer to the essence of it. We kept it light and interactive by sprinkling in playful ‘knowledge checks’ throughout the session, sometimes with wildly off options just for keeping it fun.
The brand camps were organised as a full internal campaign: a Teams webinar, a dedicated SharePoint page on the our intranet ‘Brand Hub’, a featured Viva Engage post, and an announcement in the company-wide newsletter two weeks out.
Feedback from the participants was immediate and warm: people specifically called out how much clearer the reasoning behind the changes felt, not just the changes themselves - which was exactly our intention, so that people felt enabled to do things right, because they understood them from the inside out.
The session didn't end when the webinar did. We edited the recording into a chaptered video, built a dedicated resource page on the Brand Hub, linking every tool mentioned in the session - templates, guidelines, the icon library - and had it featured as the hero tile on the intranet landing page. A month after the session, the page had been viewed more than 600 times, well beyond the original live audience numbers.
600+
views in the first month
pre-launch ensured buy-in
five stakeholder sessions
creating in-house brand advocates
The presentation slide deck was built to feel light, engaging and fun - with only key elements on each slide, allowing a fast-moving tempo through the presentation and avoiding 'death by PowerPoint'.
what I did:
A dedicated SharePoint page on the internal brand hub hosted the recorded session and the resources mentioned.
full campaign
for internal communications
SharePoint page
post session as continuous learning resource
Get in touch
Blending structure with imagination, and clarity with heart.
