The client Established in 1996, Tricon is a leading commodities distributor with 27 offices in 23 unique countries, overseeing the business's logistical operations. Since its inception more than 20 years ago, Tricon has helped over 1,000 clients move and market chemical and dry bulk products across international waters. Not simply providing the expertise to distribute these materials, but also the global market intelligence to oversee the entire trade process, from supplier to consumer, on a large-scale level. 

The background 

In a highly competitive commodities market, Tricon was looking to align its brand and communications with its flourishing reputation and position the business for further growth. Central to this was a new Tricon website which would better reflect the company’s global reach and international customers. 

Equally important to Tricon was how the company could improve employee engagement, in order to retain and attract the very best talent to its business.

We got under Tricon's skin Before we instigated any solutions or set out our strategy to help Tricon meet its objectives, we first spent time getting to know the business, its challenges, and its needs. The insight we extracted from these discovery sessions was key to ensuring we could align Tricon's communications in a way that adequately reflected the organisation's values and operations. Not only did these findings form the basis of our content and brand messaging, they also gave us direction in terms of creating the business-critical assets our evaluations identified Tricon needed.    

Building Tricon a new corporate website 

One of the biggest challenges for Tricon involved consolidating the voice of its global stakeholders into one unified central website, capable of addressing the needs of an international audience. The online user journey would be key to ensuring this new platform was able to service each worldwide user equally, so we focussed on creating a simple navigation, built around five top-level menus: About us, Products, Careers, Locations and Tricon Cares (the company’s CSR initiative). 

This simplified site journey empowered website users to quickly find and access relevant content on Tricon's website, including contact details of each local office throughout Asia, Europe and America. The homepage was kept deliberately clean and minimal, in order to direct traffic to other areas of the website, including Tricon's contact page for business leads and enquiries.  

Projecting Tricon's work through powerful photography 

As well as professional design, constructed to generate and convert more leads for Tricon, the website also required strong, brand-relevant, visuals to communicate Tricon's stature. Our team took ownership of cultivating an image bank, crafted around Tricon's industry and services, capable of aiding a user to understand Tricon's offer.  

Used throughout the website, these images help to project the scale of Tricon's operations, while providing our digital team with an opportunity to create alt-text descriptions in the site's backend, to improve SEO and drive organic site traffic visits. The images will also form a key role in Tricon's offline and online communications moving forward, to further enhance Tricon's image and reputation among key stakeholders.  

Showcasing Tricon Cares Corporate Social Responsibility is regarded with the extreme seriousness it deserves at Tricon but unless you're an internal stakeholder, or one of its charity partners, you're unlikely to hear about the great community work and initiatives Tricon champions. In an age where consumers consciously align themselves with organisations who share in their values and demonstrate a commitment to 'giving back', we felt it was important Tricon's website showcased this key side of its business. As such, we created a standalone CSR page on Tricon's website, dedicated to its Tricon Cares initiatives. Here, as well as in its stakeholder communications, Tricon can proactively showcase some of the great causes it supports and raise further awareness of these deserving organisations.  

Improving Tricon's employee engagement 

Tricon’s culture is centric to creating an environment where every employee feels valued and respected and, as such, Tricon produces a monthly internal newsletter, distributed digitally among its global employee stakeholders. 

This newsletter is now produced collaboratively in-house with Merchant, with our design and content editors taking responsibility for ensuring the newsletter's consistent style and voice, month-by-month. As well as celebrating some of the professional achievements of its team, Tricon's employee newsletter also showcases personal milestones in its stakeholders' lives, resulting in a communication that makes every employee feel valued and part of the Tricon family.   

Sarah-Jane Walker, Merchant’s Client Services Director, explains: “We’ve transformed Tricon’s digital presence in a global marketplace where it is critical that a website is a true representation of the personality and values of the company’s operations and presence. We’re delighted with the outcomes we have achieved in our work with Tricon’s global stakeholders; the collaboration of content and coming together of all the business requirements has been an immensely rewarding experience and has resulted in a beautiful website and lasting relationship between our organisations. We’re now very well placed to take Tricon’s digital transformation further in 2019.”