Corus invents its sustainability alphabet

Despite the construction industry going through a major downturn, sustainability continues to be a major driver behind all of the built environment. As we come out of this period, it will continue to increase in importance, thus the need for steel to show it’s peerless credentials in this area.

We worked closely with Corus Construction’s in-house marketing team and representatives from the BCSA to devise the A-Z of Sustainability campaign, which promoted the wide breadth of steel’s environmental benefits to architects, contractors, property developers, civil engineers and structural engineers.

The alphabet was chosen as a mechanism for the creative as it allowed us to communicate the vast number of steel’s sustainable features e.g. multicycling, long span, thermal mass, ninety nine percent recyclable content. Each of these characteristics is shown on a microsite we designed which is dedicated to the campaign (www.sustainablesteel.co.uk).

Whilst we were thinking about what each letter should represent, we realised that there were numerous strong contenders for each, confirming steel as the leading sustainable construction material.

This online and on the page communications campaign positioned steel as that material, therefore encouraging it’s specification. The campaign also allowed the steel industry to demonstrate it’s knowledge of sustainability issues which affect the whole construction market and to have a defined position coming out of this down turn.

The campaign ran in the press between March and December 2008 in all key industry titles, providing maximum reach and OTC for the subject.

The page impressions delivered by the MPU and banner ads placed on the Building and BD websites totalled 153,794 over this nine month period, which resulted in significant click throughs to the microsite, which has so far received over 125,000 hits in total, from over 4,000 unique visitors. In total 9,644 page views have been made.