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CASE STUDY

A Recipe for Culture Change: Security Storytelling for a Global Food Brand

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Key Stats

Global Food Company

Enterprise — 25,00 employees

CHANGE — Bespoke Content Services

 

The Challenge

How do you build one security culture across a conglomerate where every company does its own thing?

This global food brand operates as a house of companies as much as a single company — 25,000 employees, 40+ countries, 11 languages, with individual business units historically free to run security awareness their own way. That autonomy worked fine for regional go-to-market decisions. For security, it meant no shared voice, no consistent standard, and no single story employees across the portfolio would recognize as coming from the same organization.

The CISO's office needed to change that without steamrolling it. The goal wasn't to replace local relevance with a single centralized campaign — it was to establish, for the first time, a top-down point of view: this is how we do things here, and here's why it matters. Security needed to start feeling like part of the parent brand's identity, not another local initiative each business unit interpreted on its own.

"We realized it's not something you can buy off the shelf. You have to build it."

 

The Approach

What does it take to start a culture spark from the office of the CISO?

A shared security culture couldn't be assembled from the bottom up out of 40-plus local efforts — it had to start from one office and travel out. We anchored the whole campaign in a CISO-led video series: the CISO on camera, setting the tone and the standard, making the case for why security mattered in this organization specifically, not in the abstract. That gave every business unit the same starting point — this is how we do things here — instead of forty different interpretations of the same policy document.

From that anchor, we built a regionally localized architecture across 11 languages and 40+ countries, backed by micro-learning that kept each takeaway short and specific. Localization here wasn't just translation; it was carrying the CISO's message intact while adapting the cultural reference points, tone, and pacing to where it would land, so every business unit felt spoken to directly rather than looped in after the fact.

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The Results

What changes when security finally feels like it belongs to your culture?

For the first time, business units across the portfolio were working from the same security message, delivered by the same recognizable voice, rather than each running its own version. The CISO's office went from being a policy function most employees never heard from directly to the visible source of a culture the whole organization could point to.

That combination — a single point of view at the top, genuine cultural fit at the local level — is the hard part most conglomerates don't solve. Centralizing usually costs local relevance; decentralizing usually costs coherence. Holding both meant employees in very different markets experienced the same campaign as something made specifically for them, without losing the sense that it all came from one place.

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What Changed & Why It Matters

The change was not simply moving from local campaigns to a centralized one. It was creating a model that could hold both coherence and local relevance at the same time. CHANGE started with a clear point of view from the CISO's office — the one place with enough authority to set the cultural direction across the portfolio — and then gave each region the flexibility to make that message work in its own context.

That avoided the two common failure modes in a conglomerate: one global campaign that feels disconnected from local teams, or dozens of local efforts that never add up to a shared culture. Instead, employees across the business heard one recognizable security voice, carried consistently into different markets without losing the meaning behind it.

One Recognizable Voice

A security culture fragmented by business unit is not really one culture at all. CHANGE created a common identity for security across the organization — one point of view, one set of expectations, and one voice employees could recognize wherever they worked.

A note on client confidentiality

Human risk work can reveal sensitive information about an organization, its people and its security program. We protect that information. The stories on this site are drawn from real Cybermaniacs client engagements, with names and identifying details removed or changed. Where several organizations have faced substantially similar challenges, we may combine those experiences into a representative story while preserving the substance of the problem, our approach and the outcomes achieved.

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