Erik Mashkilleyson

Work / Case study

Chivas Brothers

Making a corporate brand live inside the business.

Turning a corporate brand into something people inside the business could actually use.

Corporate brand activation · Employee experience · 2018

Client
Chivas Brothers
Project
Corporate brand activation and employee experience
Year
2018
Sector
Spirits
My role
Digital experience strategy · Employee engagement · Activation concepts
Themes
Culture, Transformation, Behaviour
Sheet
24
Fig. 01
Design for the Chivas Brothers homepage: Bold Spirits × GSA, an event calendar and global brands, shown on a desktop screen.
A new corporate identity became a system for changing how people connected, collaborated and experienced the company.

I worked on translating Chivas Brothers’ new corporate purpose and identity into employee experiences across the business. The work explored how spaces, stories, events and digital tools could help thousands of employees participate in a changing company culture.

01 Culture

A business changing faster than its culture

Chivas Brothers had refocused around Scotch whisky and was developing a stronger corporate brand. Its individual product brands already had distinct identities. The corporate organisation itself lacked a clear shared purpose, and stakeholder research characterised it as successful and professional while also slow and overly traditional.

Employee research surfaced deeper organisational issues: hierarchy, silos, caution around new ideas and anxiety about failure.

The emerging corporate platform centred on the values Bold, Open and Resilient, with commitments including Open Up, Go Boldly, Grow Together and Share Stories. Its identity was rooted in a contemporary expression of Scottish spirit.

The brand therefore had a job inside the organisation: help create a more engaged, connected and innovative culture.

Fig. 02
An employee workshop in a wood-panelled room: a man presents a board of sticky notes while colleagues listen.
Crafting our future: an employee workshop.

02 Purpose

From purpose to behaviour

The corporate purpose became Bring the Spirit of Scotland to Life: an active idea built around generosity, courage, modern Scottishness, openness and connection.

The work then translated this into behaviours: opening up communication, making heritage relevant, growing together, encouraging courage and sharing stories.

For employee engagement, the strategy focused on three areas: responsive leadership, people-based success stories and values demonstrated through real employee behaviour.

Fig. 03
Two renders of a deep-blue, three-dimensional form built from the Chivas Brothers logo mark.
The purpose became a framework for behaviour, communication and employee experience.

03 Experience

What does “open” feel like?

My work focused on ways employees could experience the new brand through participation.

Concepts included a digital bridge between Scotland and London, creating a permanent contact point between geographically separated employee communities; an immersive teleport booth using live video; a self-service tool allowing employees to create branded posters; and a Chivas Channel for employee stories and contemporary Scottish culture.

Other activation ideas extended into multi-sensory events and live-streamed experiences connecting offices and external audiences.

The wider engagement strategy used the same principle: create places for employees to record and exchange stories, connect people physically and virtually, build shared experiences and make the company’s values visible through everyday actions.

The brand became something employees could take part in.

Fig. 04
Detail of the map: points of connection with London and Scotland, and the Spirit Box, an experience room that can change every month.
A point of connection between London and Scotland, and the Spirit Box: concepts from the activation map.

04 Change

Designing for moments when culture becomes tangible

The brand work coincided with significant organisational and workplace change, including moves involving manufacturing teams, Scottish offices and the London operation.

Communications were planned around the complete employee journey: preparation, countdown, arrival, orientation and feedback. For the Glasgow move, for example, messages connected the new workplace with collaboration, accessibility, new ways of working and the company’s future.

This made the physical workplace another expression of the corporate brand.

Fig. 05
Building hoarding at the Kilmalid bottling plant with large employee portraits and quotes beside the logo.
Employee experience extended from communication into spaces, events and everyday working life.

05

A brand built through participation

The overall engagement model was designed as a progression from engagement through empowerment into organisational transformation, with different roles for leadership, brand practitioners, employees and partners.

The intended result was a corporate brand that could connect sites and functions, encourage collaboration, support innovation and give employees a greater role in shaping the organisation around them.

For me, the project became an early example of a principle I have kept returning to.

A brand becomes meaningful when people can do something with it.

Selected artefacts

Fig. 06
Hand-drawn system map of the activation concepts, connecting manufacturing, corporate offices, hubs, a content channel and shared events.
The activation system map: hubs, channels and shared experiences across sites.
Fig. 07
Slide: We at Chivas Bros bring the spirit of Scotland to life, followed by six ways of doing it.
The engagement story: Bringing the Spirit of Scotland to Life.
Fig. 08
Slide of employee quotes about blame culture, slowness, hierarchy and silos.
What employees said in the research.
Fig. 09
The Chivas Brothers Instagram profile and story formats on two phones.
Our stories: the brand on social channels.
Fig. 10
Concert and dance photographs overlaid with the diagonal cross of the Scottish saltire.
The Scottish saltire as a brand device.
Fig. 11
Four portraits in a split, mirrored layout with the Chivas Brothers name.
Brand imagery: contemporary Scottish portraits.
Fig. 12
A blue Chivas Brothers truck with OPEN UP on its side, opened up as a stage.
The Open Up truck: a mobile platform for contemporary Scottish music and arts.
Fig. 13
An employee ID card and its reverse, the Spirit Card.
An employee ID that doubles as a Spirit Card.
01What we created
  • Employee engagement strategy
  • Digital experience concepts
  • Internal activation concepts
  • Content and storytelling ideas
  • Workplace change communications
  • Social and digital channel thinking
02My role

I worked on the digital experience and employee engagement dimension of the Chivas Brothers corporate brand transformation, developing activation principles and concepts for connecting employees, sharing stories and bringing the new brand into everyday working life.