Let's make progress
Provocation
Positioning
Verbal Identity
Visual Identity
Architecture
Naming
Website strategy
A simpler brand logic for a complex integrated service provider
An organization with many challenges: unclear business acquisition rationale, negative perceptions of its revenue model and disconnect in how prospects and clients understood them.
This branding project is a great case study for how verbal identity imbued meaning and influenced visual identity, and how cracking tougher tasks like brand architecture solved for business issues around clarity and simplicity.
A catastrophe their side sadly shelved our work but the ideas are still worth dissecting. Clients, eh?
Provocation
A complex business structure with teams that had contradictory beliefs about its function, meaning and future. We knew that such differing views would make feedback and agreement on anything challenging.
So alongside investigative research into client perceptions and comms audits, we ran an in-person workshop that gave decision-makers several conceptual scenarios for what their business meant and what brand foundation would be right for them.
This provocation helped isolate the elements that truly mattered and gain a shared understanding among teams of how to proceed and agree. It also bolstered their trust in our team to understand them and their challenges.
Positioning
We developed a single, unifying idea to encompass the broad, varied range of services the business offered to its client-base of councils and private businesses.
I created a value proposition fro the insight that clients cared more about looking good for achieving high quality outcomes, rather than overanalyzing how those outcomes are reached:
We integrate so you can be great
I also created a more palatable, corporate-friendly tagline to build on the value prop's idea:
Let's make progress – an inclusive phrase that speaks to the business's ability to do so much and the universal applicability of every client's hopes for success in their own domain.
We integrate so you can be great.
Verbal identity
I developed more messaging structures that evoked the meanings of "We integrate so you can be great" and "Let's make progress".
I proposed a verbal identity rule so that significant messages and communications expressed these ideas of progression like a formula. By choosing subjects as two halves, such as inputs and outputs, insights and impact, etc, and heroing the sentence structure of "We x so you can y", the company could have a distinctive, easy-to-replicate foundation for its brand and communications.
Visual Identity
The verbal identity device inspired the logo and visual identity.
The agreed logo was an abstract representation of progress – a shape made of two halves, one rising beyond the other. The logo became a graphic device to frame images and symbolize the company's capacity to deliver progress.
The verbal identity's two halves idea also inspired the prioritizing of before/after imagery to illustrate progress across the company's diverse sectors such as urban planning, debt collection and environmental monitoring.
Architecture
With the client's support, we cracked a mighty brand architecture and business portfolio problem around reputational risk.
The business had a house of brands model: varied, distinct brands under one master brand with wildly inconsistent treatment and hierarchy for how its brands seemed like they belong.
We dithered between ideas around how to organize sub-brands, such as by sector, B2B/B2C, and other strategic groupings. To minimize risk surrounding perception of its revenue and to protect its other B2B businesses, we realized we could elevate one of its B2C acquisitions as a visible, separate brand designed to take on more customer-facing services and absorb the public negativity, and cast the other brands as service lines rather than sub-brands under one monolithic brand.
Naming
I can't reveal what name we landed on for NDA/anonymity reasons, but I led naming workshops to help decision-makers get to a preferred name.
Starting with a tight brief, we generated and presented many name themes and territories, and whittled down to a tighter selection that underwent domain and trademark checks until we reached one that was viable.
Website strategy
The architecture solution led to new proposals for further work developing an enhanced website and brand presence for the elevated B2C brand to accompany the already-agreed website refresh for the main master brand.
