Getting the business behind a new sustainability strategy

Making sense of Refresco’s new sustainability strategy from the factory floor to the senior execs 

Refresco is a global beverage provider, producing over 40 million litres of the world’s favourite drinks every day. With sustainability issues being increasingly important in commercial, operational and reputational areas, it needed to produce a new sustainability strategy and narrative. It came to Bladonmore to assist crafting the narrative and strategy, before helping to cascade this out to all employees through a creative campaign.  

With operations in both Europe and North America, where views and attitude towards sustainability are very different, the challenge was ensuring the narrative development resonated with everyone across the company. We adjusted the framing of some key communication materials to deliver better results.  

Two key jobs of a sustainability narrative are making sense of multiple complex topics and creating the motivation for action. So, we gathered insights from people with different perspectives across the business to understand Refresco’s culture and how the business communicates internally, the varying views of sustainability and why it was important to the business.  

With these insights, we worked closely with Refresco’s communications team to develop a narrative that positioned sustainability as a natural part of how the business operates, articulated the rational and emotional cases for action and set very clear direction for how the business would continue to strive towards its sustainability goals. 

With the narrative and strategy in place, we worked closely with the communications team to build a campaign plan and toolkit to launch and cascade these communications. The campaign needed to work with the natural rhythms of the business and be flexible to local tailoring, while ensuring a consistency of message globally. 

It was important that the campaign messaging was easily translatable and understood globally, but called for action. We landed on ‘Every drink matters’, which we adapted across all the pillars of Refresco’s new strategy.

“The Bladonmore team worked to really understand what Refresco stands for and our culture, which is critical to how we communicate. The quality of the creative they’ve delivered is fantastic.”

Hendrik de Wit,
Group Director, Communications, Refresco