Making one commercial story work across 27 countries

When strategy reaches the point of execution

DS Smith was going through a broader strategic and brand transformation, with a new group-level story that needed to work across a large international business. The strategy itself was not the main difficulty. The harder question was how that strategy would travel through central marketing, product, innovation, PR, regional teams and more than 27 countries without becoming diluted, fragmented or too generic to be useful.

Each part of the organisation needed something slightly different from the same underlying story. Sales teams needed language they could use naturally in customer conversations, while product teams needed enough technical accuracy and nuance to recognise their own offer in the narrative. Country teams required room to adapt the material to local markets, while central leadership needed enough consistency to ensure that the company was still presenting one coherent commercial proposition.

Why a coherent rebrand can still fragment in the field

This is where large-scale brand transformations often become more complicated than they appear at headquarters. A positioning framework can look entirely coherent in a central presentation while becoming progressively less consistent as it moves through regions, product teams and customer-facing functions. Older presentations continue circulating, local teams create their own alternatives, and salespeople adapt material because the official version does not quite fit the conversations they are having.

Individually, many of those decisions are reasonable. The problem emerges when hundreds of small adaptations begin to accumulate, because the commercial story gradually starts to drift. What began as one strategic narrative can turn into multiple interpretations of the company, its products and the value it creates.

Example: one of the 95 different business presentations created together with the original thought leaders at DS Smith.

At DS Smith, the scale of the organisation made that risk particularly important. A limited inconsistency in one market can be corrected relatively easily, but the same pattern repeated across dozens of countries, languages, product categories and commercial teams becomes an operating problem rather than simply a communications issue.

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Translating positioning into something Sales could actually use

The work therefore moved beyond traditional brand rollout. Group-level positioning had to be translated into shorter and clearer product and service narratives that preserved the strategic intent while making it easier for sales teams to use in real customer discussions.

That required close collaboration across marketing, product, innovation, PR and regional stakeholders. The objective was not to remove complexity from the underlying offer, but to organise it in a way that helped customers understand why it mattered. Long technical narratives were reshaped into more focused commercial stories, with enough structure to remain consistent while still giving local teams the flexibility they needed.

The standard became increasingly practical. A salesperson in a local market needed to be able to find the appropriate story, understand it quickly, trust the content, adapt it where necessary and use it naturally with a customer. If that was not possible, central approval alone was not enough to consider the work complete.

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Using enablement technology as infrastructure, not as the solution

DS Smith already had Showpad in place as a sales enablement platform, but the technology itself could not solve the underlying problem. If the content inside the platform remained fragmented, overly technical or difficult to navigate, Showpad would simply provide faster access to the same inconsistencies.

The platform therefore had to be shaped around the commercial logic rather than the other way around. Product and service stories were rebuilt and organised into a more usable structure, helping sales teams navigate the material according to customer needs rather than according to the internal structure of the company. The environment increasingly became the place where brand, product messaging and sales execution came together.

This was also important for multilingual adoption. Rather than treating localisation as a final production step, the structure needed to be robust enough to travel across markets while allowing appropriate adaptation. That made the system more scalable without forcing every country to communicate in exactly the same way.

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Connecting central consistency with local relevance

The central challenge throughout the programme was finding the appropriate balance between control and flexibility. Too little governance would allow the commercial narrative to fragment again, but excessive centralisation would produce materials that local teams would eventually bypass because they did not reflect the realities of their markets.

The stronger model was to define the core logic centrally while giving markets clear parameters within which they could adapt. That allowed product positioning, customer value and brand language to remain recognisable across the organisation without removing the local knowledge required to make the story relevant.

As adoption increased, the same commercial logic could be extended into account-based marketing, events, customer advocacy, social activity and inbound programmes. These were not separate communication initiatives, but different expressions of the same underlying story.

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From brand rollout to commercial operating system

The programme gradually became larger than either a rebrand or a sales enablement implementation. It created stronger alignment between marketing and sales, more consistent narratives across countries and product categories, and a scalable structure connecting brand, content and customer-facing execution.

That shift matters because a brand only creates commercial value when it survives the transition from strategy into everyday behaviour. The real measure of success was not whether teams recognised the new positioning, but whether they could use it consistently enough to improve the way the organisation engaged customers.

DS Smith ultimately aligned more than 27 countries around one commercial system, while the work also received external recognition through Showpad and was presented on the main stage at its annual event.

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Making strategy usable at scale

The experience reinforced an important distinction between communicating strategy and operationalising it. A strategy can be perfectly clear at leadership level while remaining commercially ineffective if the people closest to customers cannot translate it into relevant conversations, materials and decisions.

At DS Smith, the work focused on closing that gap. The group-level story was converted into a system that could travel across markets, functions and languages while remaining recognisable and commercially useful.

The rebrand was therefore not the end of the transformation. The more important achievement was making the strategy usable at scale.