Percolating internally and among select dealers (including Lanoga) for months, iLevel will roll out to dealers nationwide through the remainder of 2006 with new product labeling and marketing and sales materials, among other tools, pushing toward a builder-focused blowout at the 2007 International Builders’ Show in Orlando next February. “To dealers, the change will be evolutionary,” says Liebich. “They’ll see different faces or people in different roles [within Weyerhaeuser],” perhaps before receiving products or sales materials with the iLevel logo, among other tools of the new strategy.
As one of a few dealers selected to beta test some of the tools and organizational changes of the iLevel model, Finkenstaedt was privy to the development of the iLevel logo and product packaging concepts that will slowly replace those of the five consolidating Weyerhaeuser divisions in Lanoga-owned and other dealer yards across the country, and hopes the new strategy is more than simply a new look. “The ‘fluff’ is interesting, but as long as it is still easy for a forklift driver to load and unload it, that’s what we really care about,” he says. “There’s great potential for innovation that goes well beyond cosmetic changes.”
He’s also not anxious to see the equity of brands like Trus Joist and Structurwood get buried under or completely usurped by iLevel. “If the Trus Joist brand went away, there’d be a lot of confusion [among locations and customers] and a lot of training that would have to occur,” says Finkenstaedt.
For the foreseeable future, say Weyerhaeuser officials, those two brands will remain prominent within, if somewhat secondary to, the iLevel brand. “Trus Joist will still be our engineered lumber brand, if not its own business brand,” says Liebich, as will Structurwood for the OSB realm. “We’d all like to create brands as strong as those and of Weyerhaeuser [for iLevel], but we have no intention of weakening them in the near term” for the sake of the new strategy.
As Weyerhaeuser works out the kinks and rolls out iLevel nationwide this year, the company and its dealer network hope to define the new market and branding strategy in its actions more so than on its products. “How it’s carried out is much more important than the name,” says Finkenstaedt, who is so far encouraged by the change, especially regarding the personnel he’s seen filling in the new organizational model. “In 12 months, we’ll either be saying it was a brilliant idea for achieving supply chain efficiency or asking whose crazy idea it was.”—Rich Binsacca is a contributing editor for PROSALES.www.prosalesonline.com
What Does “iLevel” Mean? In announcing its new market approach and branding strategy for the bulk of its brands representing structural frame components, Weyerhaeuser consolidated its Trus Joist, Structurwood, Weyerhaeuser Plywood, Weyerhaeuser Lumber, and Weyerhaeuser Distribution Network divisions under a new umbrella called “iLevel.” The term iLevel, say company representatives, refers to the “integration” of those divisions to a new “level” of innovation, service, and efficiency to dealers, builders, and the overall business. “It’s a new game [in home building], and it shows our willingness to change and lead based on what the market needs,” says Scott Elston, director of national accounts. “It’s hard to say what iLevel means to anyone right now, but that’s what we intend to create.”
