2012: Lafarge Cement, sustainable consumption - Case Study

Executive Summary 

Lafarge is the market‐leader in cement manufacturer and holds top‐ranking positions in aggregates and concrete.

Whilst cement and concrete manufacturers have communicated sustainability at a generic level for some time, Lafarge realised that they had a genuine story to tell which addressed industry issues. It was essential that Lafarge did more than simply talk about their ‘green credentials’; Lafarge was determined to prove their worth through a focused marketing campaign based on genuine successes in the areas of reducing CO2, reducing waste and responsible sourcing.

Lafarge wanted to demonstrate to customers and prospects that it is continually improving its sustainability achievements. Lafarge Cement adopts a three level strategy to drive sustainable consumption in the marketplace and within the company:

• CO2 reduction

• Waste reduction

• Responsible Sourcing

Although Lafarge had numerous strong, tangible and unique sustainability achievements and messages in these three areas, communicating them in an engaging way represented a challenge due to the sheer volume of sustainability communications in the industry.

Lafarge supported the SustainableTM campaign with an innovative product launch (Cemergi®), and developed a product positioned to satisfy the market’s need for sustainable building materials. Through improvements to internal processes and developing, launching and promoting sustainable offers for the market Lafarge Cement have reduced total CO2 emissions by 1.9 Mt CO2 between 2007‐2011. This is the equivalent of taking 660,000 cars off the road for a year.

Company Background Lafarge has been a major player in the UK construction sector since entering the British market in 1987. Today, Lafarge is the market‐leader in cement and holds top‐ranking positions in aggregates and concrete.

Challenges and Opportunities 

Whilst cement manufacturers have communicated sustainability at a generic level for some time, Lafarge realised that they had a genuine story to tell which addressed the issues raised by the policies. And it was more than simply presenting a positive image; it was also about communicating their growing success at producing and providing genuine sustainability. However, it was essential that they did more than simply talk about their ‘green’ credentials to the wider‐world; they were determined to prove their worth through a focused marketing campaign based on genuine successes.

Using sustainability as a catalyst for change, Lafarge continually review and update their production processes. Including the development of a product positioned to satisfy the market’s need for sustainable building materials, called Cemergi®. It is the lowest CO2 embodied cement available for construction in Great Britain. Competitors do not have an equivalent product.

Objectives

• To demonstrate to customers and prospects that Lafarge Cement is continually improving its

sustainability achievements in every possible area, at every possible opportunity, to benefit

their customers and the environment.

• Increase Lafarge Cement’s Sustainability image.

• Increase penetration, sales and market share of Cemergi® from pre‐launch to launch.

• Increase awareness of Cemergi® and its attributes and benefits.

Three level Strategy
Lafarge Cement adopts a three level strategy to drive sustainable consumption in the marketplace and within the company:

• CO2 reduction

• Waste reduction

• Responsible Sourcing

CO2 Reduction
Lafarge produces both Packed (in bags) and Bulk (higher quantities e.g. lorry loads) cement offers for different target end user sectors and segments. Over the last five years significant CO2 reductions in both the packed and bulk cement offers have been achieved:

In the Packed sector, the cement range comprises of two main products (General Purpose Cement and Mastercrete) with a further four specialist products completing the range. GPC and Mastercrete represent over 95% of cement sales by volume and from 2006 through 2010, they were both reengineered to contain approximately 20% less CO2, whilst still providing customers and end users with the same value proposition as previously, but with the sustainability benefits of lower CO2.

In the Bulk sector, two lower CO2 cements (Portland Limestone Cement and Phoenix) and a newly launched product, Cemergi® have provided the marketplace with a lower CO2. PLC has approximately 20% less CO2 and Phoenix has approximately 30% less CO2. The new and innovative Cemergi® cement has approximately 45% less CO2 making it the lowest CO2 embodied cement manufactured and available in the United Kingdom.

The success of these three products in the marketplace has meant they have moved from representing 13.8% of the Lafarge cement product mix in 2008 to 34% in 2011 so over one third of the entire bulk sales are in lower CO2 cements. This gives even more indication of the demands for sustainable building materials in the modern day marketplace. When looking at the whole Lafarge Cement product range, the lower CO2 cements have been increasing within the product mix year‐on year since their launch and in 2011 represented over half of all product sales.

The combined effect of these new and re‐engineered products and their success in the marketplace mean that over 1.1 Mt of CO2 has been saved between 2007‐2011 meaning on average over 200,000 tonnes of CO2 per year has been saved. To put that into context, 200,000 tonnes of CO2 per year is the equivalent of taking 70,000 average petrol cars off the road per year.

Waste Reduction
Lafarge Cement has been active in utilising waste materials as an alternative fuel i.e. recycled waste tyres and as alternative materials within the production process. This sustainable approach has reduced the amount of material going to landfill as well as reducing CO2 produced (50% reduction in construction site waste to landfill – 2011 compared to 2005).

The combined effect of these approaches has meant that over 0.8Mt of CO2 has been saved between 2007 and 2011, which means on average over 160,000tonnes of CO2 each year has been saved, which equates to taking over 55,000 average petrol cars off the road peryear.

Lafarge also developed an innovative cement recycling service for customers collecting any out‐ofdate cement from customers and sends it to one of Lafarge’s Works to be re‐engineered and processed back into making new products. For every tonne recycled Lafarge has pledged to plant a tree within the local community.

Besides environmental benefits of reducing customers’ waste to landfill as these out‐of‐date products would previously have been scrapped, by using this out‐of ‐date material in new products, it reduces the extraction of virgin materials necessary to make new products. It also provides a lower cost to customers than if they disposed via landfill.

Over 2,500 bags of cement have been collected and recycled, which is enough cement to lay 500,000 bricks. The initiative has been highly praised throughout the industry and has been included in The Construction Products Association 2010 Innovation showcase publication.

Responsible Sourcing Lafarge Cement led the cement industry as it became first GB manufacturer to obtain the responsible sourcing accreditation (BES 6001). This independently and extensively assessment by BRE Global demonstrated that Lafarge is minimising and managing its environmental impacts for areas like CO2, waste and transport as well as demonstrating that its products’ supply chain is traceable and ethical.

Lafarge scored strongly for its products, achieving a ‘Very Good’ classification for its Bulk and Packed cements and ready‐to‐use products. This innovative approach of having its entire range assessed means that all of its customers from precast concrete manufacturers and ready mixed to merchants and builders will all receive responsibly sourced products.

Communicating Sustainability – Strategy and Approach 
Although Lafarge had numerous strong, tangible and unique sustainability achievements and messages, communicating them in an engaging way represented a challenge due to the sheer volume of sustainability communications in the industry.

Both qualitative and quantitative market research was conducted to determine what customers thought about Lafarge’s current sustainability efforts, and how this compared to their competitors.

In‐depth interviews were then carried out with customers. These showed that there was a sense that organisations were only doing what had been forced upon them and that very few cement manufacturers really cared about sustainability issues. The resulting insight was that if a company was to lay claim to the sustainability territory – and, more importantly, could back up their claims – there was potential for real differentiation in the marketplace.

Strategy and Approach ‐ Sustainable
All these factors led to the creation of the overarching Sustainable concept, which was used to convey the message that Lafarge considers what being sustainable means for customers, not just in theory but in practice. In short, Lafarge were able to deliver sustainability with a purpose, with clear, tangible and commercial benefits for their customers, built‐in as standard. And this could, in turn, be used by their customers to substantiate their own claims to sustainability.

Lafarge also utilised existing secondary research to unearth several suitable channels that could be used to deliver their sustainability messages to the market. DM and email were tested on a sample of customers, which provided enough backing to consider both for the campaign, with email performance results being especially attractive.

Leveraging the SustainableTM core theme – ‘Lafarge is Sustainable because Lafarge is able to…’ ‐ Lafarge provided hard evidence about Lafarge’s efforts towards sustainable construction in a simple and original way.

Tactics and Implementation ‐ Sustainable
Direct mail, online display, email, and press were utilised for each message, which all directed traffic to a purpose‐built Lafarge sustainability microsite, Sustainablelafarge.co.uk, which completed the integrated campaign. Contacts were urged at every touch point to read more about Lafarge’s sustainability credentials and to download the latest Lafarge Cement Sustainability Report (When requiring hard copy.

SustainableTM also featured heavily on Lafarge’s exhibition stands at a number of sustainability and construction events, the biggest and most relevant being Ecobuild 2010.

As well as the campaign’s unique core theme – SustainableTM ‐ the creative imagery was illustrative rather than photographic. This style was previously unseen within the construction industry where photography had dominated press and online. Using illustrations was not only more cost‐effective for Lafarge, but also allowed the creative team more freedom to produce imagery that accurately reflected the intended messages.

Tactics and Implementation ‐ Cemergi
The SustainableTM vehicle was also used to support the product launch of Cemergi®, which also incorporated a strong creative idea based on Lafarge’s desire not to green wash, but to provide hard evidence around it’s sustainability credentials.

The concept entitled ‘FACT’ was approved and rolled out to market. The thinking behind this was very simple and stemmed from the volume of truths Lafarge could talk about regarding Cemergi®. It was not an opinion or a market poll that made Cemergi® the number one sustainable cement in the UK; it was and is a scientific fact. The concept allowed the message of each communication to be absorbed quickly by utilising the visual representation of ‘FACT’ alongside a ‘reason to believe’ (e.g. No cement in the UK has lower embodied CO2). 

This was backed up by qualitative research project carried out with potential customers’ decision makers and key influencers, which showed that majority viewed sustainability communications with a large degree of cynicism. For example; they did not want to see more campaigns showing green fields with children playing in the foreground etc.

Campaign Results
Although much larger than the packed sector in terms of value per order and total quantity, the number of prospects and customers in the bulk‐buying sector that Cement manufacturers are able to target directly is comparatively small. Therefore the following results are both a great indicator that sustainability is becoming more important within the construction industry and also act as a good indicator that Lafarge are effectively promoting sustainability within their organisation.

Between 2007 and 2011, through developing and promoting sales of lower CO2 cements we have reduced CO2 emissions by 1.1 million tonnes, which is approximately 200,000 tonnes per year.

Results SustainableTM
Campaign email results were excellent with the highest open‐rate being over 25%. Average clickthrough rates for the three emails was 7% (10% for the CO2 reduction message). 32% completed the online survey and 43% of those respondents opted‐in to receive email communications from Lafarge.

A key indicator of Lafarge’s sustainability perception comes from the annual Lafarge Cement UK customer satisfaction survey. At the end of 2008 Lafarge’s sustainability image was at 68%, which was improved upon by 1% in 2009. However survey results following SustainableTM campaign activity at the back end of 2010 showed that Lafarge’s sustainability image had increased to 76%, a 7% increase on the previous year.

Results Cemergi® 
The Cemergi® information page received 219 unique visits in Q1 2011. Sales volume, market share and penetration.

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