Rebranding the Brand Specialists

Traduction française: "Le rebranding des spécialistes de la marque"

For over ten years, we’ve been harping on clients about the importance of a strong corporate identity. After all, creating and redesigning logos has always been our forte. But in the hustle and bustle of building our own business and helping others build theirs, somehow our own corporate identity was never revisited. Until now.

After nearly a decade, IDG Communications is rebranding. Time to walk the walk! Let me say that it is far easier to tell our clients how to rebrand than to do it for ourselves. In order to help the process along, we decided to pretend as though IDG was our client. The choice to begin our rebranding process was a natural one because within the last few years we have a new team, we offer new services and the industry as we know it has changed. Our team felt we needed to refresh our look to better reflect the times and plan for our future growth. Having a proper motive for change is essential in the rebranding process.

With an in-house team of talented senior graphic designers on hand, it would have been easy to just assign the task of the logo redesign with a short brief of “Time for a change, show me something cool”. But that would not have been what we would ever do for a client, so instead, we opted for the full rebranding process: research, audit, analysis, briefing, exploration, execution, launch and assessment. Notice that I repeat the word “process” a lot when I talk about branding. A process is  a series of actions, changes, or functions bringing about a result. And it takes time. Lots of time. From experience I knew we needed at least 6 to 9 months to do it properly, especially considering we had to put our real clients above all else.

How did we do it? This blog is the first of a four part series about how the Branding Specialists rebranded themselves. In this first post I will discuss the first phase: planning, research, audit and brief.

Designing from the inside out.

An important part of a corporate identity make over is making sure the entire company is involved and supports the project. It comes from the top down. Luckily, as a small team, this was the quickest of the steps. Everyone was very excited about creating a new look for the studio and was eager to share their thoughts. As the Marketing Director and President, I wanted –asked, and expected– everyone to contribute, but made it clear that not every proposal would be entertained. We needed the ideas to be in sync with our business objectives. Wonderful, except after twelve years of operations, we had lost sight of our business objectives! I hadn’t looked at the business plan since I wrote it and it looked nothing like what the company had become! Talk about a shoe maker with no shoes!

Once we established a tentative schedule based on the process, we tackled each step which made the entire exercise feel more “do-able”.

Step one: dig up everything we had ever written about our business goals, marketing plans and action lists. We compiled our notes, researched our competition, found where we fit in the market place. We interviewed each team member to find out what they thought of the company, their job, where things were heading and what role they would play. From that we were able to extract a brand brief. The brand brief included our vision, our mission, attributes, value proposition, key beliefs, target audience, key market, and competitive advantage. In it’s raw form, it looked like this:

We are

• Brand specialists
• Business minded
• Practical
• Flexible
• Effective

We create

• Value
• Meaning
• Differentiation
• Sustainability
• Coherence
• Adaptable solutions

Clients appreciate our

• Commitment
• Fresh ideas
• Patience
• Easy-going nature
• Authenticity

Step two: in looking at “WHO are we?”, we also had to establish “WHAT are we?” After many discussions and cases of beer, we decided – or perhaps discovered – that we are a studio. Not an agency, not a boutique, not a firm, not a shop – a studio. The word studio is derived from the Italian: studio, from Latin: studium, from studere, meaning to study or zeal (= passion, enthusiasm, eagerness). It seems like an easy thing to establish, but it took a lot of introspection and thought.

Step three: once the brand brief was created, we needed to focus on the creative brief. The documentation that would help our team of designers brainstorm in the right direction. In it, we established our team goals, communication goals of all brand identity elements, the application list, functional criteria, mind map, SWOTs, positioning, protocols and presentation dates.

Again, in very raw format (having not reached the copy writing phase of our vision or mission statements) we were able to establish the brand overview that we would all work from. Each piece we created would have to adhere to this pyramidal brand logic:

The first phase took us approximately six months to complete. Had we worked only on this project, it likely would have been completed in two months or less. As a business owner I can’t describe the feeling of excitement and relief I felt once this phase was completed. It gave me a new energy, a new sense of pride – in my team and in our company as a whole. While the process was time consuming, the outcome was liberating.

In my next post, we’ll look at Phase 2 of the rebranding process: exploration and execution. Let the fun begin!