Writing the Science Like a Human
Case Study/Chevron

Turning Scienceinto Story

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Prologue

It's the 21st Century. Energy is evolving. One of the world's biggest oil companies was ready to evolve with it.

NeedBrand Strategy and Messaging
IndustryTech & Industrial
ClientChevron
THE CHALLENGE

You're the world's leading energy expert.

But if you sound like it?

  1. No one wants to listen.
  2. No one gets on your side.

The more Chevron developed and learned and studied and sold and developed and learned over it’s 150 year history, the harder it became to remember what it’s like to not know. That’s the gap we set out to fill.

Chevron's homepage hero, where a male and female engineer look at a 3D rendering of an oil site. The copy says "Moving towards a lower carbon future."
Our Approach

The Heavyweight vs the Internet

The brand voice read like a regulatory filing. Hundreds of pages of cold, distant, scientific text built for a Linux machine. A battlefield between stakeholders and experts. Legal over creative. The website assumed every reader knew the science and stocks of energy. But they completely left out the audience who could get on their side:

The actual public.

The Heavyweight vs the Internet
THE WORK

THE RESOLUTION

The Transformation

We stripped every page to its core content, navigated the crossfire of CEOs, SMEs and legal, got everyone really close to the same page, and rebuilt Chevron's voice from the ground up. We held a hard line for a 10th-grade reading level designed for phones first to protect the modern user’s experience.

The Renewable Fuels hub was our core test. Instead of just talking about renewable fuels, we built a tiered system based on industry needs — not the oil industry, but every OTHER industry that relies on oil. We made the story interesting enough that a visitor could get it in thirty seconds or stay for thirty minutes.

The Transformation
Frame 1
FRAME 001
FRAME 002
Frame 3
FRAME 003
THE SHIFT

The bounce rate dropped significantly. The fresh voice and design was showcased on UX and PR sites, and the Renewable Fuels hub became the #1 most visited page on chevron.com.

How?
We stopped talking at people and started telling the right story.

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