Is your brand working smoothly enough to gain recognition, or is it trying to be all things to all people… and failing?
Who doesn't love the sound of multichannel, infinitely variable identities speaking directly to individuals with bespoke content. It's slick. It's what everybody thinks they want. But the energy and resources required to maintain and wrangle these behemoths are often underestimated.
What we should really focus on is doing simple really, really well.
We look at them and often don't realise the size of the comms team or the number of agencies that massage them into place and keep them coherent. The ubiquity and unbelievably high calibre of work out there is putting immense pressure on organisations that don't have millions of pounds and multinational creative agencies sitting behind them. They don’t have a large dedicated marketing team with an even larger budget, which leads to confusion over where to allocate resources and adds stress to charity brands with small, often overstretched comms teams. What we should really focus on is doing simple really, really well. Then you can have your dynamic logos and multiple landing pages for hyper-specific audiences—once you've earned them.
To do that you need a crystal-clear brand ethos. Then you focus on the verbal and visual identity.
But none of that makes any sense if you're not first creating one good landing page for one audience. To do that you need a crystal-clear brand ethos. Then you focus on the verbal and visual identity. That leads to one clear logo that works across everything, from favicons to billboards. That, by necessity, will be simple and, through repetition, earns recognition. You have one strong font, one strong colour, and a visual identity that's instantly recognisable.
You need to earn your brand. When people feel their identities aren’t working, they add more shiny things or scrap the brand guidelines, telling the new agency to "do what they want" or "run with it." Then the brand spirals out of control. You spend more time reviewing weird posters and briefing confused designers on what’s left of the brand, not to mention managing what’s already out in the wild. Often, you’re left asking, “What even is this?” and that’s where the confusion begins—leading to inefficiency and heaps of stress.
This is where we come in. When we start a rebrand we often discover all these disjointed assets, and our first step is to strip everything back to the basics. Wrangle everything back into position. Let's save the messaging strategy for another post. We go back to the logo and question everything: Is it necessary? Is this fit for purpose? Is the ethos correct? Once we've established that, we can start exploring which other parts are working. Are there any diamonds in the rough to be polished? Can they be expanded into something familiar yet exciting—something that’s easy to use consistently without becoming dull? In fact, setting constraints is often where creativity thrives.
This is how you wrangle your brand. It’s through this process that you bring clarity and cohesion to create a powerful identity that speaks to your audience.
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