In late 2019, we embarked on a brand update. We refrained from calling it a re-brand because our brand fundamentals were still relevant to the spirit and direction of our company.
Our services evolved and our team grew. We needed to communicate these changes to attract a new and different tier of clients and specialized projects along with recruiting new and specialized talent to our growing team.
We set out to create a dynamic identifiable brand for our own agency.
Full service agencies are easily commodified and are not distinguishable from their competition. While Brandish does offer full-service marketing capabilities to its A.O.R. clients it has intentionally positioned itself away from being a full-service agency in order to differentiate itself from competitors through its focus on overarching business, brand and marketing strategies.
Our agency must clearly define our business, capabilities and work. It will be easier to connect with Brandish’s audience and new clients if Brandish clearly defines who they are and creates content that contributes to defining Brandish. This will build trust with Brandish’s audiences.
More and more agencies are using data to drive their strategies. This is an opportunity for Brandish who already focuses heavily on the research and assessment phase for strategy development.
We appreciated consultancies in-depth approach to making high-level recommendations and we noted the many parallels between our approach and their business model, but there were also many differences. One notable difference is we wanted to execute our recommendations. We wanted to be a partner to our clients through the development, execution and reporting of our approach.
This is a challenge because businesses are turning to their internal teams for their marketing needs, but an opportunity for Brandish. Brandish’s approach is brand-focused and as an outside agency, Brandish can provide insight into a client’s industry and audience that are often overlooked.
They relied on their client work to dictate their brand and then built original content products that played into that perception.
In the age of democratized information and the empowered consumer, organizations that focus on better understanding and meeting the needs and desires of their customers will ultimately perform better.
We identified key objectives that would propel our agency forward into our next phase of growth. This update wasn’t just about physical growth, it was about growing our agency’s perception so it aligned with our national and global peers.
Our capabilities had grown to a place where we could service larger national clients and we needed to communicate that to national and global audiences.
Relying on existing definitions for how we categorize ourselves wasn’t going to work. We needed to clearly define what Brandish did and the value we provided to our clients.
We needed to develop context around what we did as an agency and understand how these core competencies could attract and be valuable to new audiences. We also needed to ensure our own team understood what we our agency did and how to explain what we do to their own networks.
Build a brand identity and communication framework that doesn’t recede behind our clients but stands on its own doing what few agencies do for themselves —become a brand.
We wanted our brand personality and visual identity system to be dynamic and be fluid so our personality could adapt to the context of any situation. This way, our brand could embody a certain duality. For example, we could be extremely creative and playful on social media, but yet our personality and identity could also be refined and intelligent through our case study content. Possessing this duality, we could occupy numerous spaces especially ones that have traditionally been represented by very singular and specific traits.
As we expand our business and enter new markets, our brand would have to grow with us and be flexible enough to incorporate these changes. We wanted evolution built right into the brand.
It wasn’t enough for our brand to just be “online.” We wanted our brand to be inherently digital. Our online brand experience should feel digital not adapted to a digital landscape.
Lots of brands say they want to be authentic. It’s easy to say you’re authentic, but being authentic is about communicating your authenticity though your actions. In order to do this, we needed to determine what we do and say (or not say) in certain situations. Understanding how to be authentic in a meaningful way was the jumping off point for building our brand personality.
There are a lot of agencies out there. We’re doing things differently, so now was the time to clearly define who we are and clearly communicate what we do. Being able to succinctly define ourselves would ultimately set us apart from our competitors because we’re weren’t looking for everyone to like us, just Change Agents (more on that below).
We used our visual brand identity and brand personality as the foundational elements for our brand update.
From our research and competitor analysis, we knew we didn’t identify as a traditional advertising agency and aligned more with a consultancy because we spent a significant time researching and assessing our clients, their industries and macro trends in order to make high-level strategic recommendations to our clients. But, we did execute our recommendations which separated us from defining as a traditional consultancy. Therefore, we decided to combine the agency model with a consultancy.
Like a consultancy, we develop in-depth recommendations for businesses based on research and insights about their audiences. But, we get rid of uncertainty surrounding execution and reporting by transitioning to an agency model for implementation. We execute our recommendations while reporting on our progress so we can continue to make informed decisions.
We carved out what a Consulting Agency looks like by balancing the duality between creativity and technology. Our roadmap to being a Consulting Agency was for our audience to perceive us as a Creative Powerhouse and an Enterprise Solution.
So often brands pick a set of adjectives to describe their tone of voice, but it comes off as inauthentic. Through this analysis, we realized we were never going to be just one sole adjective or set of four adjectives all at once. Instead, we found that we would probably lean into a certain personality trait in specific situations. Like people, we were a sum of personality traits that came to the forefront in varying degrees depending on the context of the situation.
The goal for building our brand personality —be human.
We started by choosing three adjectives that spoke to the different facets of our personality considering all of the arenas we wanted to operate within.
And then, we built this tool.
Where each section overlapped, we created a new personality trait that combined two of the core traits. This added another dimension to our personality. We referred to these tones as nuanced personality tones.
We didn’t want to change our logo for the sake of having something new. After evaluating our logo, we determined it still translated our updated brand personality well. We shifted our focus from a redesign to applying the logo differently and separating the wordmark from the logomark. Although they are broken apart the lion will always be present. We developed a solid badge treatment which makes the complex lion shape feel a little simpler.
Red, green and blue light combine to create vibrant back-lit hues. This vibrancy is a signature of digital design and has inspired our palette. We selected a sequence of colours from cyan to red to establish harmony and order.
Our neutral palette was inspired by night mode colouration. The new vibrant colours will be used in moderation or in a muted variation. And, we expanded our colour palette, but red remains the primary brand colour. Our palette in practice has an intelligent yet approachable and creative feel.
Our illustration system focused on two styles: technical, vector style illustration and hand-drawn. We used illustration as part of our brand to make elusive concepts more tangible. Illustrations were drawn to convey a feeling of motion. Motion in design is special; it is both inherently digital and human.
What we’re saying is different, so we wanted to create some consistency. One typeface that was flexible to our voice and environment and complimentary to our broad visual language.
People are now inundated by near-limitless choices. Every day, more and more businesses are competing for their attention.
Your brand is now what you say you are but the summation of your audience’s attitudes towards. This means, we needed to develop our brand experience in order to start connecting with our audience.
In order to bring our new brand to life, we crafter a communications strategy that would guide our content creation starting from our brand launch. This strategy outlined how we could hit all our personality notes and shape our content so that it would flesh out our brand story. We analyzed what each content piece would give to our audience —why would it be valuable to them and how would it strengthen our connection to them?
This strategy also outlined how our content could grow and build into new content pieces and channels. We delivered a strategy that outlined what channels we wanted to be present in and where the audience was, and content pieces that were informative, engaging and ultimately, valuable to our audiences.
Here’s the content that cultivated our brand experience for our launch.
The first place our audience would go to learn more about us is our website and likely, this would be people’s first introduction to our agency. We developed a website that balanced the creative powerhouse and enterprise solution by telling our narrative story (what our brand stood for and why) with how we worked and why these services were valuable to businesses.
We focused on creating a brand experience that was easy to navigate, engaging and bold. We wanted our website to feel intuitive so we implemented animation that referenced karaoke / ticker text animation along with parallax animations that helped explain how we worked.
Typically, agency case studies are cornerstone content pieces to share their work and client roster. For us, we wanted our case studies to show our in-depth analysis, strategy, execution and the results. So we approached our case studies that way. We wanted to invite audiences “behind-the-curtain” and walk them through our work sharing all the comprehensive details. They’re very long but that’s because we didn’t want to leave out any of the details. This content piece differentiates us from other agencies because we tell you all the details: the who, how, when, for how long, the execution and the results. We hold nothing back.
We launched with two case studies: Robertson College and Birchwood Automotive Group.
We did want to connect with audiences and build relationships. For launch, we developed a launch narrative that acknowledged that we hadn’t actively been communicating. We took the approach to be human meaning we re-introduced ourselves to our audience, acknowledged we had been quiet and now we ready to upholding our end of the relationship.
This approach showed we were trying to build a meaningful connection with our audience rather just sharing our new website. We actively worked to hear from our audience by asking how they were doing through Instagram story features.
Check out some examples here:
We had to shift our focus and approach when we went into quarantine and navigate our way through a changing landscape. A brand launch looks a lot different now. We weren’t able to celebrate in person as a team or with our partners who have seen us grow over the last five years.
Read more about how we navigated our launch in our blog post here.
Usually this part in the case study, we would wrap up with some qualitative and quantitative results, but it’s impossible to share those because we’re just getting started.
What we can share is this article from The Message featuring Morley MacDougall, Managing Partner & Creative Director. We also commit to keep you posted with what we do by re-visiting this case study and updating what we’ve been up to.
2016
2016
Lee Waltham, Morley MacDougall and Derek Elliott start Brandish working out of Lee's sunroom. They sign a few local clients and their first national client, SCMA.
Brandish is given space by Downtown Biz to have a small office in their building as part of a business accelerator program. They sign a few more clients including MIG.
2017
2017
The team moves to their own office in Winnipeg Exchange District.
The team brings on Alexandra Martin, Director of Strategy & Planning to the team along with key players in design and digital.
The agency’s client portfolio continues to grow, signing Futurpreneur and Birchwood Credit Solutions.
2018
2018
The agency enters into a period of rapid growth. Now, the team is six people and they move to a larger office on Main Street and sign Birchwood Automotive Group, Robertson and RightRide.
2019
2019
The agency expands hiring over 25 new team members and building out its internal team and core competencies.
2020
2020
The agency embarks on a brand update to reflect it’s increase in growth and to align its core competencies to its public perceptions.
We face a global pandemic without laying off any team members and retaining our AOR clients. We work with our partners to strategically guide them through the shifting landscape.
Brandish launches a new website and brand across social media in September 2020.
