Last year began as an exciting year for us folks in the Corporate Publishing team at SAP. Our goal: to relaunch our media, including the employee magazine that I am responsible for, SAP World. I had spoken to a number of independent consultants and solicited their opinions of SAP World and one remark stuck like a burr. The magazine was Teutonic and square, said that expert. SAP World was full of amateur photos and head shots. The features and interviews were long and turgid.
But there was much that we did well and that we wanted to retain: profiles of people who work at SAP and have had interesting careers, executive interviews, features on software strategies, new products, work-life balance. We had even done a series of country specials on the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), allowing two or even three editors (including myself) to travel from Bangalore to Beijing to witness firsthand SAP’s investment and involvement in the emerging markets.
Yet we were after better storytelling, better visuals, more digestible content. We identified agencies with credentials in the corporate publishing business, prepared a detailed brief, and opened the field to the pitch. The battle began. Our incumbent agency was among the companies invited to take part in the pitch, an agency that SAP had had on contract for its customer and employee magazines for 10 years. We saw brilliant work from these agencies, concepts for print publications and online platforms. In the end, our decision was based as much on these concepts as it was on a gut feeling, a feeling that we could imagine spending long periods of time with the agency’s team and could develop not only brilliant publications, but enjoy a close working relationship. We chose a small, Munich-based agency with a strong background in advertising, which almost spoiled their chances for some of the corporate publishing purists on the selection committee. Even their name is original: grasundsterne is a compound formed by joining syllables taken from the founders’ surnames. They gave me something I always wanted for SAP World: a cover concept that puts an individual SAP employee (or two or three) front and center. We had tried this before (see our India edition below) but their cover idea is repeatable, and never looks anything but simple, fresh, and startling. It captures the SAP demographic and expresses what we wanted the magazine to stand for: a youngish culture, techy but trendy. This was our first cover after the relaunch:
This is SAP World before it got a makeover. Our photographer in Bangalore captured the spirit of this young lady, a quality manager in the Enterprise Resource Planning team who also happens to sing classical Indian music in her spare time. I loved her on the cover, but when I see the old against the new, I can’t help but being mighty proud of our new magazine.
