Clarus brand creation

Clarus is one of New Zealand's largest energy groups. Whether it’s transmission, distribution, supply or storage of energy. Made up of Firstgas, Rockgas, Flexgas, First Renewables, and Firstlight Network, the companies within Clarus service over a million Kiwis.

But they weren’t always called Clarus. The original parent company Firstgas Group was initially born as a corporate brand that wrapped together child brands Firstgas and Flexgas. Over the years their portfolio grew and as they found themselves no longer exclusively focused on gas distribution and supply, they came to Plato for guidance exploring a new name and brand architecture that better fit their entire family of brands. Core audiences included industry stakeholders, and internal staff and potential future employees.

Firstgas Group had also primarily been there for structural and operational purposes, but the Governance team had identified the need for it to move from the background into a leadership position with a strong voice and identity of its own. The new group brand needed to give staff a sense of belonging no matter which business they worked under, as well as tie their regional stories together into a national conversation to show their scale and increase their collective voice across industries they want to play a lead role in. This is critical as the Clarus brand can now front and communicate their future-focused position of innovation as they work on solutions to help reach Aotearoa's 2050 net carbon zero goal.

To bring this enterprise-level business to life with its new name we worked with stakeholders from across Clarus' marketing, IT, human resources and project teams over a period of 12 months. We’ve created a messaging suite and brand that aligns to their aspirations and embodies their vision of 'Proudly leading the delivery of New Zealand’s energy in a changing world'. The identity elevates them substantially to reflect their standing on the national stage, while equally uniting their team under a common banner that they can all invest in. We’ve helped express the new brand through key marketing assets including a launch video, and supported their internal team to roll it out across a number of touchpoints such as internal and external building signage at their national office; a suite of internal launch collateral to get their team excited and informed about the change; as well as important documents, and BAU items, and templates.

We also worked with Clarus to establish a digital strategy that identified the needs of a corporate brand in the digital world. Having agreed on a dedicated website for Clarus, we actioned the end-to-end design and build of a bespoke website. The homepage has been crafted to introduce the new Clarus brand in a visual and eye-catching way, supported with the Clarus launch video which was produced by our team. See the website here.