Case Study: Building Quality Connections 

 An award-winning internal magazine tells a brand’s continuing story across continents. 

The Opportunity

After continuous growth and numerous acquisitions, Quanex established a new brand platform for employees to rally around: A Part of Something Bigger.

The new platform made business sense in pursuit of becoming a $2 billion company. Writing it down was easy. But how to connect it to the hard work global employees were doing each day? And how to create real buy-in from newly acquired businesses? We gave them a way to read all about it.

The Client

 With 7,100 employees––up from 3,800 in 2023––across 67 facilities all over the world, Quanex is a leading manufacturer of window and door profiles, IG spacers, screens, cabinet components and more. 

The Scene

 A few intranet posts wouldn’t cut it. An internal email campaign might go unopened. Together, Akhia and Quanex found a way to cut through clutter, to tell the stories of Quanex employees from the shop floor to the C-suite, and to rally a united team around a shared purpose. 

The Plot Twist

 With most company employees working on manufacturing floors, a purely digital campaign was not an option. Many employees don’t maintain a company email address. 

The Action

Quanex and Akhia developed a twice-yearly employee magazine called Quality Connections. The 20-page, full-color printed piece was delivered to all employees, highlighting all areas of Quanex’s businesses.

Quality Connections told unique stories from around the company. New business wins, executive interviews, local community involvement, safety performance, and a twice-yearly message direct from CEO George Wilson were all a part of the recipe.

 Quanex’s specific goals included: 

•  Increasing internal transparency 

•  Helping employees to understand their individual parts of the bigger picture 

•  Bringing disparate cultures from different divisions together around a central purpose. 

 To develop the stories, Akhia worked with Quanex team members from around the world, and encouraged each contributor to tell their story, as they experienced it, to stand out from standard corporate messaging. 

Impactful storytelling and eye-catching visual appeal were key. Artful imagery and color paired with attention-getting features like callouts and sidebars and an occasional word search or scavenger hunt that kept readers turning the pages to the end.

The result? Greater unity and a shared sense of purpose around the globe.

 By The Numbers 

With the new brand platform in place, Quanex embraced it and expanded upon it, embedding it across facilities, materials, websites, internal and external communications, and apparel. And it remains strong and ever present five years after its introduction.

Across eight issues in four years, the work added up to:

• Translated into 11 languages

• 2200 Spanish copies + 4750 English copies printed

• Delivered to 4,250 homes and 45 plants

• 100+ employee interviews

   

The Victory Lap

 With employee reception strong, Quanex and Akhia submitted the project to an annual PRSA Rocks awards conference in 2023. The teams left the ceremony a winner. 

The Last Word

“The team regularly fields requests from managers of employees who want to be featured in the next issue, and the leadership team takes an active role in participating in the articles and using them as a starting point for conveying top-down messaging.” – Cristina Murray, Quanex Marketing Director during the majority of the publications and client sponsor for award submission/win.

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