International Paper

The Client

International Paper (IP) is a global producer of planet-friendly packaging, pulp, and other fiber-based products and one of North America's largest recyclers. Headquartered in Memphis, Tennessee, the company employs approximately 39,000 global colleagues committed to creating what's next. It serves customers worldwide, with manufacturing operations in North America, Latin America, North Africa, and Europe. Net sales for 2022 were $21.2 billion. 

The Situation

A growing global company, International Paper's legacy brand (and website) was limiting its growth. To establish a "new" International Paper, the paper giant needed to develop a sustainable digital marketing presence centered on storytelling. The company had a long legacy to acknowledge, but more importantly, it had developed an exciting vision around sustainability, which it wanted to communicate globally. 

The Challenge

As with any company with more than a century of history, there were challenges on the path to embracing digital transformation. The largest technical challenge was content-based. The old website was built in a legacy CMS, making it cumbersome to manage and difficult to maintain. Additionally, content organization proved challenging, as much of the website content was new and undefined. IP's existing content and products were very region-focused, difficult to get to, and offered in multiple languages.

Design governance also presented a challenge. The company wanted to bring its new brand to life, at scale, while keeping the site on brand as it continued to evolve. If it gave regional marketers too much flexibility with component-based design, the brand could suffer from visual disconnects. But if it didn’t give marketers enough flexibility, they couldn’t deliver the right message in the right way.

International Paper wanted to implement a new corporate digital experience to make content management easy and scalable across teams while avoiding expensive developers needing to maintain a complicated system. The new site needed to be leaner, more efficient, and easier to manage. IP has a vast catalog of products, which needed to be easier to understand, faster to use, and more manageable by global marketing teams.

Ultimately, the site needed to be a stepping stone toward a truly international message, with localized and translated product content per region. The design system needed to be highly flexible to adapt to future regions, languages, product acquisitions, and marketing campaigns. 

The Solution

Partner Elevated Third led IP through the discovery process, focusing on communicating the new branding in a new digital platform. Elevated Third held UX sessions to determine how to structure global content management. The teams validated the website architecture with quantitative user testing, ensuring users had clear paths to the relevant content and tools they needed. 

Integration was also a consideration; while the website served as the primary digital touchpoint for IP’s end customers, the teams needed to consider the company’s other martech systems when architecting the new Drupal-based digital platform. Specifically, Elevated Third connected or integrated IP’s customer engagement software, CRMs, digital advertising, and B2B analytics tools with the website to leverage data. While simple data tracking was the obvious starting point for martech integration, the team focused on laying the groundwork for an evolving, easily composable digital ecosystem.

Elevated Third also migrated content from IP's existing Product Finder feature to a flexible Drupal architecture, which allows users to navigate the site better. By removing the cumbersome Product Finder feature, IP could retain unique content per region while making it easier for users to browse the site — the new architecture provides such a radical improvement that the product finder was no longer necessary. And design governance issues were also resolved; IP’s flexible yet sustainable design system allows its brand to stretch where it needs to, while also remaining consistently strong across the globe. 

The Results

By uniting individual business units and once siloed parts of the business, customers can navigate International Paper’s vast paper product catalog in a way that is much easier to understand, faster to use, and more manageable by global marketing teams.

Specific quantitative results include:

• 75% increase in engaged sessions
• 67% increase in views to all contact pages
• 381% increase in views to sustainability-related page 
• 91% task completion rate