Brand new brand? What’s next?

A lot of work we do nowadays is helping businesses and organisations figure out what to do next – after the high-fives and the champaign popping launch of a new brand has died down. The presentation went fabulous. The visuals look beautiful. The MD is happy, and everyone is on board. Now what? Who picks up the ball and runs with it?

The creative team are back in London playing ping-pong and retro Space Invaders. There’s a V.01 PDF set of guidelines dispensing invaluable guidance such as ‘write like we’re human’ ‘Don’t change the font on the logo’ etc etc. But what do you actually do next? It’s your new baby. Your pride and joy. How do you make your brand spanking new brand sing and start earning back the investment you’ve put into it?

A great many businesses don’t have an in-house design team and it can be a matter of hours before the new brand is getting butchered by Brian from accounts putting an urgent Powerpoint together. It can all too soon spiral out of control and then it’s like herding cats to try and regain control of the original vision and shiny-shiny niceness.

The other end of the spectrum is to have a sole, rigid brand guardian acting like a nightclub bouncer from the 90s. ‘If it’s not EXACTLY how it is in the brand guidelines it’s not getting’ in’.

Both approaches effectively half-kill the brand that you’ve been working so hard towards. It’s not the big brand agency’s fault, but more often than not;

1. They don’t want to do the roll-out for 200 items of packaging or update the sales presentations.
2. You can’t afford their day-rate for the vital, but slightly less sexy aspect, of the brand roll-out.

That’s a gap we are finding ourselves filling more and more. We know what we’re doing. We like to be in at the forefront and be creating the brand ourselves but we’re equally comfortable picking up a brand that, in the words of the late, great Eric Morecambe – has all the right notes – but not necessarily in the right order. The big agency will take the path of least resistance. If it’s packaging, then a nice minimal square box in the presentation has loads of room and makes everything look Instagram cool. They don’t want to get dragged into sorting packaging the size of a matchbox that needs 27 translations, legal jargon, and half a dozen recycling icons – and the fancy new logo must be a minimum of 50mm high.

We’re able to take the guidelines at surface level, interpret them without losing the core principles and take them to far greater heights than first envisaged. It needs to be remembered that almost every brand or re-brand is, ultimately, a bit of a punt. It’s trying it out for the most part to see how it sits on the standard items. The low-hanging fruit to use the marketing jargon. Some brand guidelines are incredibly thorough and extensive but generally, they aren’t a fait accompli. The brand needs to be tested out in the real world and reviewed, tweaked, refined, and made to work better – it’s never going to be 100% perfect on ‘GUIDELINE V.01’. We’re a talented team (if we say so ourselves) of front-line designers but we also enjoy the nitty-gritty of solving problems that come up with guidelines and roll-out and how far we might need to ‘bend’ them to make them work.