Rohm and Haas Company
About Rohm and Haas: Rohm and Haas, founded in 1909, is a Philadelphia-based specialty chemicals company with $8.2 billion in revenues. The company provides innovative materials and technologies to a variety of industries, including electronics, construction, transportation and pharmaceuticals.
Challenge: Although Rohm and Haas was well known within the chemical industry, the company had never received substantial coverage in the mainstream and trade media. With competitors such as BASF and DuPont undertaking expensive brand-building campaigns, Rohm and Haas needed to foster greater brand awareness, especially for its efforts to engineer environmentally advanced materials.
Strategy: Ricochet identified two key objectives for Rohm and Haas, namely to generate broad awareness of the company in the business community and drive coverage of specific products relevant to contractors and the construction industry. To pursue these goals, two separate but simultaneous campaigns were crafted. After conducting a series of background sessions with Rohm and Haas executives, Ricochet discovered that 2007 would be the first year that the company would devote 50% of its R&D budget to sustainable chemistry initiatives. Ricochet viewed this as a major milestone and an opportunity to bolster the Rohm and Haas brand. Concurrently, a second campaign was designed to publicize a formaldehyde-free binder for insulation and a low-VOC paint formulation to construction and coatings trade publications. Ricochet arranged for Rohm and Haas market managers to speak with trade media about the technical aspects of the new technologies and their potential impact on business operations.
Results: Leveraging Rohm and Haas’s investment in sustainable R&D, Ricochet arranged in-person briefings with major mainstream and wire reporters. As a result of this outreach, Rohm and Haas received coverage of its sustainable R&D program on all four major newswires in a single day: the Associated Press, Reuters, Bloomberg, and Dow Jones.
In addition, the company’s 90-day project with Ricochet resulted in coverage of their new product lines in trade publications including Architectural Products Magazine, Buildings Magazine, Coatings World, and Environmental Design and Construction.