ITT Industries
In The News

All underneath one umbrella; ITT ads promote its diverse products

By Arundhati Parmar,
The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette
December 21 , 2005

In Fort Wayne, ITT Industries is known as a defense contractor that makes military radios. So it may come as a surprise to learn that the very same company makes many different products including waterfiltration products, water pumps and products for the recreational boating industry.

To drive home the fact that the White Plains, N.Y.-based company is in reality a global company that makes a range of diverse products, ITT has launched a corporation-wide rebranding campaign.

"It's not a radical change to our existing brand," said Tom Martin, senior vice president of corporate relations at ITT, which became an independent publicly traded company when the ITT Corp. conglomerate split into three public companies in 1995. "What we are trying to do is have a single, unified, global organizational brand for all of ourdifferent companies, and we think that this is the right time in the company's evolution to do that."

ITT has 17 different business units -- it's a sort of Procter & Gamble,except its playing field is the industrial market and not P&G's consumer one. Martin declined to comment on how much the rebranding effort will cost, saying the company does not break out marketing dollar figures.

Already the logo -- ITT Industries -- is being altered. The word "Industries" has been dropped, Martin said, and a bolder shade of the gold color is being used. ITT's advertising agency -- New York-based Doremus and Co. -- is developing ads that will be featured in trade publications throughout 2006, said Howard Sherman, managing director for Doremus' New York office.

"We are developing advertising for different product categories and then relating it to the ITT brand," Sherman said.

One thing that is not changing is the "Engineered for life" tag line that Doremus created and which ITT has used since 1998. "It's important because it speaks to both the reliability of ourproducts and durability of our products, and also the fact that theyserve really vital human needs whether it be bringing water to dry places and cleaning up water or protecting people's security," Martin said.

While ITT's products in the defense market -- night vision goggles and Single Channel Ground and Airborne Radio System, among others -- are marketed using the ITT name, some business units use individual product brand names to go to market, Martin said. Hayes Roth of ITT's branding and design consultancy -- Landor Associates -- said his company has been tasked with identifying product brands that are valuable and then tyingeach of them to the broader, corporate ITT brand.

"They have an overproliferation of legacy brands -- smaller acquisitions ITT has made over the years -- but they tend to diffuse the larger ITT brand around the globe," said Roth, recently promoted to chief marketing officer at Landor in New York. "The goal now is to have a few relevant brands and still have them under the ITT umbrella."

The company has already seen some success this year in terms of relating individual brands to the broader ITT banner. It attended the Water Environment Federation Technical Exhibition and Conference in Washington, D.C., in late October, and all of ITT's water business products were consolidated in one booth.

"We did surveys before and after the trade show, and we saw a very significant increase of customer's perception of ITT as a market leader," Martin said last week. "In the past, they viewed us as just a manufacturer of lots of different components, but through that presence at the show and bringing all of our different systems under one roof, and showing the range and breadth of our products, it really gave people a much better sense that we are a significant market force in that field," Martin said. "And that's the kind of thing we are trying to promote with our customers and with our employees."

The rebranding effort will encompass not only ITT's trade show presence but other aspects of its marketing and promotions.

"The goal will be to have one overall look and feel for anything marketed by ITT so that there is a common look to the advertising, to the literature and to the promotional materials that they might provide, including Web sites, so that it looks like the one company that it is," Roth said.