Customized visual language drives internal communications

Key leaders had a theory that a visual language was the key to creating a new way to communicate both internally and externally. This project proved they were right.

Challenge | Lawson was looking to explore the idea of creating a Lawson-centric visual language. The company already had developed a voice, vocabulary and tone unique to the company but wanted to take the next step by creating a Lawson visual language that would allow customers and employees an easy way to embrace who it was as an organization while setting it apart from the competition. Lawson wanted to create a way to visually explain and differentiate its products in a way that was easily understood by customers. However, this was a large undertaking so Lawson decided to “test” out its visual language theory internally first by transforming its written mission, vision and values into visuals. This would allow the company to explore some new ideas without having to tackle the largest challenge right away.

Action | The XPLANE team traveled to Lawson’s offices for the initial discovery session. The meeting gave the group the opportunity to fully understand the Lawson business and for Lawson executives to describe to XPLANE its mission, vision and value statements. From there, the combined team looked deeper into each of these statements and pulled out the key differentiators and messages to be communicated. XPLANE then started creating suggestions for visualization.

“Going into this project we didn’t know what we were going to end up with, all we knew was that we wanted something that would visually represent our mission, vision and values,” said Martin Hill, vice president of marketing at Lawson. “We wanted it to be simple enough for our employees to reproduce, complete enough to tell the whole story, and memorable enough to act as a reminder of the story whenever they saw it. XPLANE produced a final image that did just that. The next step was to then empower our people to actually be able to draw the visual depiction themselves.”

Lawson’s team traveled to Spain to once again reconvene with XPLANE who taught senior executives techniques for drawing the mission, vision and values with confidence. Out of that session Lawson took away recorded videos of its team drawing the statements and a first draft of a pamphlet which supported the video recordings which were then finished in house.

Results | Lawson employees have been impressed with the new image. When being presented, the drawing itself isn’t the star of the show but instead the person who’s holding the pen. People are absolutely captivated by the visualization.

Here’s a link to a video of Travis White, a Lawson senior vice president, presenting Lawson Software’s Mission, Vision and Values — visually.

“If we can continue to find ways to explain complex concepts, technologies, products and services through a visual language I’m sure it will positively impact sales, internal training, product implementation and how our customers view us. Through working with XPLANE we’ve realized a new way of thinking and proven that a visual language does work.”
— Martin Hill, vice president of marketing, Lawson Software