Congrats you just finished talking to every person you have ever come in contact with and asked them what their thoughts were about your company.
Just kidding, but I do hope you did take the time to interview the key stakeholder in your company and your best clients what they thought about your brand. It’s super important to have this type of information or the next steps are going to be really hard and you might end up with a logo that confuses your audience even more and have to start all over.
You have all this golden data, now what?
It’s a lot I know, but once you strip it down and look at the trends you will know what you need to keep and what to get rid of. What are the aspects that your clients and audience have come to know you for, what are they not connecting with? That will be the driving force to either update your mission and vision statement, your brand promise, or even your core values.
Once you have figured out the messaging and how you want people to feel about your company you then start with the visuals. The messaging will be the driving force as I stated above. If you are wondering if you have everything covered with your messaging, check out my Brand Assessment Guide HERE, it gives you a checklist of some housekeeping you need to do before you start on the next step.
Your messaging is done and now you are ready to talk colors and fonts.
Triad finally finished updating all their messaging and it was time to begin to look at the visuals. We knew that we were at the center of Retail, Brands, and People. We had to equally communicate that these were who we work with and who we were trying to help.
After weeks of working on the branding concepts and developing a look that actually communicated what we were trying to achieve. We finally had our new brand but the work was not over yet. You can look HERE to see what the logo was when we started the re-brand process.
Once the logo was approved, we were so ready to start developing out the full visual brand.
COLORS: I was tasked with picking out our secondary colors as we refined the primary colors, dark purple, purple, blue, and teal. It’s important to make sure you have your CMYK, JGB, and HEX colors picked out. If you want to go a step further you can pick out Pantone (PMS) colors to go with your brand as well.
FONTS: We needed to find a clean modern font that represented our brand and was going to be timeless in the retail space. It’s also important to pick a large font family. A font family is a font that has many different type of “versions” to pick from, Bold, Light, Italic, Regular, etc. This lets you stay on brand but gives you a variety to pick form to create more dynamic designs.
GRAPHIC LANGUAGE: I then began to work on the graphic language and how we were going to use the different branding elements. This consisted of how the logo was going to be placed on social media, advertising, motion graphics, video, etc. Your Graphic Language is there to help guide you on how to create different design elements to make sure you stay on brand.
ICONOGRAPHY: Next I developed the iconography set. This is something that a lot of companies struggle with. They get icons from the internet that don't match their brand and they don’t all look like they belong together.
PHOTOGRAPHY: I was also tasked with sourcing images that spoke to our brand and our brand values. Another huge miss with companies is they don’t stick to one image style. They just grab whatever free image they can find on the internet. You want to try to stick to one type of image style. Most people gravitate towards a lifestyle shot rather than a stocky looking image or a plain product shot. They want to see a product being used.
BUSINESS COLLATERAL: Once the overall branding was finalized, I then worked on rebranding all of our marketing materials and business collateral, the business cards, letterhead, our HR documents, social media and other marketing materials that our sellers and other teams used. This can be such a daunting task and most companies do not realize how much STUFF they have until it’s time to update it all. Triad's business cards were unique, I developed them with the corner clipped to match the same angle as our logo. This element reinforced our new look and made us stand out from just the standard business card. I also picked a super smooth finish.
BRAND STYLE GUIDE: One of my favorite things to design once the whole branding process is over are the style guides. A style guide is your brand bible, it outlines everything about your brand, your do's and don'ts. This allows other members of your company to develop materials that are on brand. You worked hard on this and spent a good bit of money, so you want all this hard work to pay off. You can view the full Triad style guide that I designed HERE.
There you have it, you have gone through the process of re-branding your company.
Now you have this beautiful new brand that actually communicates what your company is and does and who your ideal client is. Now you are ready to launch it into the real world. Click HERE to see more creative examples of the full visual brand.
Celebrate your accomplishment, you want the world to know that you have successfully rebranded your company. Do just sneak it in and flip the switch!
February was picked for our big launch, we called it Brand Love Day. On the morning of, the social team and I got in early to upload the new social graphics that we had been working on. We had been teasing out different brand elements through the week leading up to the big reveal. We did this to build excitement and let people know that something big is coming. When you spend all of this time re-branding a company you don’t want to just flip the switch and sneak it all in.
Be proud of all the hard work you put into this.
Brand Love Day was also the day that everyone turned in their old Triad branded materials and was handed new branded swag. Our Sr. Event Manager, Michele Caruvana, who was a freaking 9 month pregnant rock star, brought in music and amazing food to celebrated the new Triad. The whole building was transformed. We took down all the old branding throughout the week and started to sneak in sneaking in new branding elements and placed them throughout the building. Then that morning we revealed all the new signage and branded elements.
It was an incredible day.
Remember to take the time to celebrate this huge milestone in you company’s journey may it be a 400+ employee company or just you, rocking your business every day!
Think you might be ready for a new brand? It is still early in the new year, let’s start the conversation!