Brand Strategy and MessagingChevronTech & Industrial2026
It's the 21st Century. Energy is evolving. One of the world's biggest oil companies was ready to evolve with it.
But if you sound like it, a) no one wants to listen, and b) no one gets on your side. The more Chevron developed and learned and studied and sold and developed and learned and so on and so on over it’s 150 year history, the harder it became to remember what it’s like to not know. And that’s the gap we set out to fill.
The brand voice read like a regulatory filing. Hundreds of pages of cold, distant, scientific text built for a Linux machine. Every page was a battlefield where stakeholders and experts fought for accuracy, while Legal held a veto over what was clear vs "correct." The website assumed every reader understood the science and the stocks of energy. But they completely left out the people who could get on their side: the public.
THE RESOLUTION
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.
How? We stopped talking at people and started telling them the right story.