How Shell Lubricants is Encouraging Greater B2B Collaboration with Its New Campaign
Shell Lubricants believes the key to successful operational efficiency and reduced total cost of ownership is increased industry collaboration and the harnessing of the power those relationships can yield. And it’s looking to further promote this ethos with its new B2B campaign.
The Shell brand as it is known today was born in 1907, when the Royal Dutch Petroleum Company and Shell Transport and Trading merged. The new company was named the Royal Dutch Shell Group and adopted the pecten shaped logo, which would evolve into one of the world’s most iconic brand identifiers. After the merger, the group expanded across the globe, eventually exploring and carrying out production in Russia, Romania, Venezuela, Mexico and the United States.
Today Royal Dutch Shell is one of the seven oil and gas supermajors and employs over 80,000 people. The Netherlands-based company has revenues of $240,033 million and sits at #7 on the Fortune Global 500.
Shell Lubricants
The finished lubricants arm of Shell’s business, Shell Lubricants, is the global leader in its market, and has been for the last eleven years. Last year Shell Lubricants launched its first ever global brand positioning campaign named Together, Anything is Possible, which had a core tenet of reducing total cost of ownership (an estimate of the direct and indirect costs of a product of system) for B2B companies.
Now Shell Lubricants is looking to build on the success of that initial campaign by helping companies in advancing industries overcome present and future challenges, through increased and improved collaboration.
(Video source: youtube.com)
To highlight this message, Shell Lubricants has created a short video documentary, detailing the story of Mr. Ram Bhandari. Titled, The Bat Doctor, the video tells how Bhandari has been repairing and modifying cricket bats for the last 25 years. Each bat he customizes is tweaked to the needs of each cricketer, including their individual stance and batting style.
It’s Bhandari’s expertise and skill, combined with an in-depth knowledge and understanding of cricket and the people who play it, which allows the master craftsman to create the demand for his bats, and partnerships with India’s most elite cricketers.
B2B Collaboration
It’s through this story which Shell wants to hammer home the belief that working together with customers and clients is an essential component of success. The combination of technical expertise, deep industry knowledge and understanding, and long-term relationships, drive revenue and value, whether delivering lubricants or crafting cricket bats.
"As a part of our continuing promise on building greater collaborations with our customers, Shell Lubricants has undertaken an extensive exercise to understand the current lubrication practices and core challenges that affect industrial operations,” said Vice President of Global B2B and OEM Marketing, at Shell Lubricants, Troy Chapman. “Companies realize that proper maintenance is important but are not set up to succeed. Maintenance teams are under strain, and lacking knowledge around effective lubrication. Hence, we are offering our people expertise to ensure we can all power progress together."
As part of this campaign Shell Lubricants has carried out research into the lubrication practices of Indian manufacturing and construction. The results of the study found that a lack all the aforementioned factors – expertise, well-resourced teams, effective practices – was hindering the uptake of new technologies and processes.
With new technologies being a key component in reducing total cost of ownership, Shell Lubricants believes collaboration is the key to addressing these issues and helping all B2B business become more productive and profitable.
“At Shell Lubricants, we pride ourselves on working closely together with customers to help improve their equipment maintenance practices and enhance their competitive advantage, now and in the future,” said Country Head of Shell Lubricants India Cluster, Mansi Tripathy. “This sharing of expertise will become only more valuable to help companies navigate the changes that lie ahead. We have helped companies in India achieve cost savings of close to INR 57 crores as of today, helping them enhance their competitive advantage."
Final Thoughts
The story of The Bat Doctor gives a human face to the power of B2B collaboration and provides an elegant method of getting Shell Lubricants’ message across. Improved collaboration can make it easier for companies to adopt new practices and technologies and reduce their cost of ownership in the future.
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