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Business Situation

Client needed to determine the company's visual ‘look’ for the coming year and beyond and capture that strategy in a document to serve as a guiding reference for all corporate materials that would be created.

Strategy

While every company is an amalgam of processes, infrastructure, assets, and people (all of whom have different personalities), we recognized that like a single individual, the coming together — the sum total — of all of these attributes creates a real but intangible persona for the company. The outward persona is what clients recognize as the company's hallmark essence, it’s true “brand.”

We asked ourselves what are our own personality traits? What are our values? What are those things that differentiate us from someone else? (our own, personal ‘competitive advantage’) In a self-examination brainstorming session, each member of the project team listed their traits and shared the list with the working group. We used the knowledge gained from the discovery process to examine the company in four categories: Personality Traits, Differentiators, Values, and Partnership. Traits such as passionate, confident, hardworking, smart, trustworthy, listening, flexible and anti-status quo were a few qualities that topped the list. We later returned to an idea session bringing visual examples which each person believed represented the personality traits of the company. Ads, photographs and abstract art were all pinned on the wall and were critiqued and categorized. We proceeded to refine the image selections as before until we arrived at the most representative photos, colors and textures.

Results

The end result of the discovery and refinement process was a “visual vocabulary" and style guide for the development of future marketing and communications materials to all audiences so that the visual representation of messages could be consistent with the client's corporate “personality” and could be applied consistently over time, reducing confusion in the marketplace and helping to grow the brand.