A brand agency or individual expert can help you make sense of everything that goes into making your organisation what it is and determine a strategic course to support your brand.

But, and this is where it can get confusing…why is it that no matter who you go to, be it consultant or agency, each and every one puts forward a different approach? And it always comes complete with its own terminology and (buzz)words or, worse still, uses the same words in different ways.

Start with positioning

Getting clear on your positioning is fundamental to the success of any branding work that you undertake. If you’re thinking of turning to books for advice on positioning you may well find that a lot of it won’t feel relevant – that’s because this is a subject that’s often written about from an advertising and FMCG angle.

So, to redress the balance, this post outlines my approach – a very specific take on what clients coming to me can expect to receive from my brand strategy process.

It’s a process that, as you go through it, informs not only the creative expression and marketing activity of your brand, but also its operations and human resources. In fact, I believe that brand strategy should be as intertwined with the overall strategic plan of a business as it is with the creative expression of the brand identity, with each informing the other.

While most people think of positioning as a marketing concept, a shift in positioning feels more like a shift in business strategy. Every department inside the company is likely to be impacted over time.

April Dunford, Startup Executive

Focused direction for your organisation

My focus here is squarely on service-based organisations (primarily third sector, and the tech and creative sectors). These organisations look to build the awareness and reputation of their brands. They rarely have massive advertising or marketing budgets and, as such, look for brand-building advice that will serve them in the long-term. Any decisions they make need to be strongly evidence-based with actions being easily implementable.

The approach I detail will help you develop a strategy that is far more than just words on a deck. You’ll have direction, advice and recommendations that you can take forward and use across your teams as well as in your creative.

What is positioning and why is it useful to service-based organisations?

Brand positioning is essentially a compelling promise that organisations need to convey to win their audiences’ minds and hearts. You’ll sometimes hear ‘positioning’ described as a singular tagline like Apple’s ‘Think Different’. Just two words, but behind them is a well-researched and thoroughly documented strategy – you can’t just land on words without putting in the research and collaborative thinking.

In this post, when I refer to brand positioning, I’m referring to a brand positioning strategy, one that considers, ‘where you play’, ‘what your audience cares about’ and ‘what you care about’.

Foundational to this are what I call, positioning pillars – a single point or more commonly two to three points you want your audience to know and remember about you. These position points can be soft/emotional (heart) and hard/factual (head) but when combined they resonate and provoke action (hands), prompting people to reach for the phone, click a fundraising link, submit a job application or more likely, just take notice, building brand awareness so that when the time comes for a decision to be made, your brand is the one that’s front of mind for your audience.

There is genuine commercial danger in getting positioning wrong. Any consultants or agencies that you work with have to recognise that there’s an ethical dimension to any advice they give. In setting out my position on positioning and illustrating what I believe to be the best approach and in doing so am also demonstrating that there’s a right way and a lite way.

There are numerous elements involved in arriving at your brand positioning – planting that flag on a hill. I like to think of them as jigsaw pieces and, just like with a jigsaw puzzle, if you miss a piece, you end up with an incomplete picture – frustrating and underwhelming in equal measure.

Getting the full brand positioning picture

Of course it might be tempting to take some shortcuts but, particularly for service-based third sector and purpose-led organisations, I believe you need to be using all the pieces in the positioning jigsaw puzzle, interrogating each and every one of the areas and elements listed below.

No one answer, however rigorous the response might be, will get you to where you need to be – there are no shortcuts if you want to have the full brand positioning picture!

The brand positioning puzzle pieces’

Can the founder or chief exec define your brand’s positioning?

The short answer is ‘no’.

Why? A senior leader defining your brand positioning throws up the issue of selective attention. All humans benefit, as well as suffer, from this. Selective attention may give the organisational leader the benefit of laser-sharp focus but it also comes with blind spots – they may not be able to see the wood for the trees. The other danger is that without team engagement, you get no team buy-in.

Of course, taking the senior leader’s viewpoint (their insights and hypotheses) into consideration is vital, in fact the whole brand positioning process may derail without it:

Positioning is a business strategy exercise – the person who owns the business strategy needs to fully support the positioning, or it’s unlikely to be adopted.

April Dunford, Startup Executive
However, it’s something that should be the first step, not your only step.

Can you define your brand’s positioning from audience research?

The short answer is ‘no’.

Why? The problem of only using audience research to define your brand positioning is that brands don’t exist in a vacuum. True understanding of positioning comes from knowing the market, alternative providers, i.e. the competition, and the business objectives of your organisation.

You have to listen to your stakeholders, both internal and external, and wherever possible introduce research into the process as early as possible, but their insights should sit in the round with all the other pieces of the puzzle. And it’s also essential to remember that not everything they tell you will be relevant.

Can you define your brand’s positioning from data?

The short answer is ‘no’.

Why? Data alone won’t engage your audience. Brand positioning only becomes effective when audience heads and hearts are engaged. Take data into consideration but recognise that it can only ever be one piece of the puzzle.

Can you define your brand’s positioning from a team workshop?

The short answer is ‘no’.

Why? The problem of defining your brand positioning from a team workshop/series of workshops (even if you bring in an outside consultant) is that it will only give you the insiders’ perspective. Informative and essential, you’ll undoubtedly uncover some gems but you need to be doing more than just looking inward.

Can you define your brand’s positioning by bringing in creative talent?

Surely, a creative is all you need – a brand writer or intuitive designer to look at what you’re currently saying and how you’re presenting yourself, do a little desk research and then come up with the brand positioning answer?

The short answer is ‘no’.

Why? A creative, working in isolation can only offer a very one-sided view. They’ll come up with something based on what they know. In the absence of their having an understanding of your world, its challenges and how you’re perceived, their biases, assumptions and preferences will inform their choices. You may get something clever and snappy but it won’t be a true reflection of your organisation.

Creative talent is important and will bring your positioning to life, but this part of the puzzle only comes into play once your brand strategy has been defined.

Can you define your brand’s positioning from a brainstorm?

The short answer is ‘no’.

Why? The problem with defining brand positioning from a brainstorming session is that the loudest, most confident people in the room end up asserting themselves which leads to an outcome that reflects only their views – a group-think mentality sets in.

You can incorporate brainstorms by all means, but these do need to be managed carefully. You need to make sure that the environment is a safe one, that everyone gets heard and that those who maybe aren’t able to respond as fast in this sort of session can input ideas at their own pace.

Can you define your brand’s positioning from a moodboard?

The short answer is ‘no’.

Why? As it only presents what you and your team likes and dislikes, a moodboard is never going to be an adequate tool for a fully defined positioning. Moodboards can’t tell you what your audience cares about or what else is happening in your market or in the wider world.

A moodboard represents a jumping ahead in the process. You can incorporate moodboards and co-creation but they’re never a good place to start.

Can you position your brand by looking and sounding different?

The short answer is ‘no’ – the longer answer is, ‘in part, yes’.

Why? Merely looking and sounding different is an ‘easy’ fix that, without the other pieces of the puzzle in play, can only ever offer a superficial positioning answer, creating a position that will be difficult to ‘defend’.

Researching your market category, considering whether you want to go for parity or difference (sometimes parity is stronger than difference) means that this piece is then able to add weight to the overall picture you’re putting together.

Can you express your positioning in a tagline – a single positioning line?

The short answer is ‘yes’. But the long answer is heavily caveated.

Why? The problem with defining your brand positioning with a tagline is that it won’t be useful to those working in the organisation: operations, human resources, front desk… It may be tempting to jump to a concise, clear brand message but your team/s need to understand the thinking behind the words. This is where a strategy document comes into its own as it includes not only brand statements like mission, vision and values but also provides your team with evidence, guidance and direction.

So what should a brand positioning process look like?

A brand positioning exercise is something that’s grounded in current reality but ambitious enough to explore and define future aspirations.

A well-rounded approach gives the people in your service-centred business, (people who work hard to serve their clients and customers) the space to be heard and to think, and adequate time to be creative.

In the words of Alina Wheeler – from her seminal book, Designing Brand Identity, “The best positioning builds on a deep understanding of customer needs and aspirations, the competition, the strengths and weaknesses of a brand, changes in demographics, technology, and trends.”

A process of scoping, gathering and defining will ensure that all bases are covered and no stone is left unturned. Effective brands are effective precisely because they listen to different perspectives and are able to look outwards as well as inwards and all around.

Putting your positioning into play

Once you’ve defined your points of difference and your brand promise, the work of establishing a belief about your brand in people’s minds begins – it’s time to bring it to life. Start to create your visual and verbal brand identity and your marketing strategy. And build your operations and talent around it.

Don’t take shortcuts, use every piece of the puzzle to present a whole-picture position for your brand, ensuring it is:

Relevant to your audience – focusing on something they care about

Specific – highlighting what you bring to the table and not falling back on lazy superlatives or vague generalisations

Impactful – solving the need or desire of your target audience

Credible – making a promise and proving you can keep it

Distinct and defendable – putting you in control of your niche with clear water between you and your competition

Spirited – sparking chemistry and connection

There are organizations that love the fun part of coming up with a beautiful, bold promise, but shy away from the dirty, difficult task of working out how exactly that’s going to be delivered, to whom, and how. There are also organizations that create intricate brand onions, wheels, bridges, or platforms, but are utterly bereft of a creative expression that people can actually care about and believe in.

Nick Liddell, Brand Strategist

Stay true to your brand positioning

Getting clear on your positioning is a superpower but only if, once you’ve settled on it, you stick to it. Don’t chop and change. Your audience won’t remember your brand if you say it or they see it only once. Consistency of approach is key as it builds memory and mental availability when the time comes for action.

And if you need further proof of how clear, easily-defendable positioning has the potential to break through in a noisy world where we’re all constantly being overwhelmed with choice – check out this post which runs through the very real business rewards of doubling down on your positioning.

And, in the words of and following the example of the great Dolly Parton…

Find out who you are and do it on purpose.

Recent years have seen increasing numbers of clients bringing their design execution in-house. This can mean anything, from large organisations building their own internal agencies of highly skilled team members, well versed in using industry standard software and overseen by a brand manager, to lone marketing managers using subscription software like Canva to produce their brand’s day-to-day marketing and comms. And it’s a trend that’s not going away any time soon.

A growing trend

Typically, the trend to build in-house resources goes in waves, driven by the state of the economy. When budgets are tight – resources, quite unsurprisingly, are brought in-house. As the economy bounces back, external agencies come back into play. But nowadays, with drag-and-drop online software and AI tools, that move in-house looks set to stick.

You could call it the democratisation of design. So much more can now be achieved with far less; for example, you don’t necessarily need knowledge around, say, typography or layout principles, something that used to be the sole preserve of designers, in order to create serviceable social media content templates.

Democracy is good, right?

As much as it creates opportunities, this sort of democracy also brings with it a number of challenges for both client and external agency. Needless to say, the quality of experiences and outputs will vary depending on an organisation’s attitude, structure, expertise and culture. To generalise…

Opportunities [on the client-side]:

Flexibility and immediate access to resources.

Insider-advantage – knowledge of the sector and competition as well as the internal machinations of the organisation.

Lower costs

Challenges

Overwhelm – too much work for too little resource. In-house teams are likely to be pulled in a number of different directions, carrying responsibility for skill sets other than design (such as marketing and copywriting).

Less authority – sadly, it’s a fact that an external specialist often garners more respect with senior leadership than a more junior internal team member.

Limited perspective – in-house teams, by their very nature and insider status, struggle with being able to effectively step back and see the wood for the trees.

Less expertise – external agencies tend to laser focus on their specialisms which means they have the advantage of staying up to speed with the latest innovations and trends in their particular area.

What an outsider brings to the table

The challenges listed above (by no means an exhaustive list) should confirm that in developing an in-house resource you should never close the door on bringing in outsiders, i.e. external agencies and specialists. An external perspective can complement and enhance in-house capabilities, meaning you’ll benefit from:

Experience of selling change in – specialists, in particular senior specialists, are experienced in providing evidence for change, articulating and defending a rationale, and responding to objections.

An objective viewpoint – an internal brand or marketing manager may have a hypothesis or gut feeling but will not have the time, nor access to the methods and tools, to test that theory in a truly objective manner.

A wider lens perspective – external advisers will have encountered similar patterns and trends from working on comparable client challenges. They can apply these experiences alongside their facility for having that ‘big picture’ whole-of-market view.

In short, they leverage their specialist expertise for strategic impact.

When is the best time to seek specialist help?

The obvious time to bring in specialists is to bridge skills gaps or to inject a creative spark into brand campaigns, rebrands and refreshes. But time is of the essence. If there’s change afoot – if you’re looking to evolve your positioning or fully reposition your brand – don’t get too far into the process before calling those specialists in.

I’d argue that the best time to bring external help in is when you have an unscientific hunch that things aren’t working. The outsider can propose the best method to objectively test your hypothesis – introducing rigorous research methods, moving away from those knee-jerk, solely emotional responses and casting a wider lens over the entire project. It’s one action that will, in the long run, save you time, money and unproductive brand soul-searching.

The importance of building ongoing relationships

For your brand to thrive and prosper, your facility for accessing external specialists shouldn’t be limited to crisis or special case scenarios. Building ongoing relationships means that both sides will be able to get the most out of their connection and the client will benefit from being able to address issues before they become problems.

That external perspective can be invaluable, for instance, when you find your brand going a little off-piste. This can sometimes be down to the people on your team changing. Having an external brand champion to call on means you’ll be able to right things by running a refresher on the whys and wherefores of your brand strategy, ensuring that the concept and thinking behind the brand doesn’t ‘leave the room’ when your staff move on.

You might also consider using an agency or individual to provide ongoing creative direction or mentoring. This approach will help you develop your skills, adding to your in-house capabilities, and ensuring you’re on the case, retaining and building that all-important brand salience (i.e. knowing when to pull in the reins when there’s an appetite to gallop off in a new direction!).

Embracing an open and collaborative mindset

From an agency perspective, the tide of in-housing creative and design resources isn’t going out again any time soon. In fact, according to the 2024 DBA report What Clients Think, 22% of clients without an in-house creative resource stated that their company was currently considering developing this capacity.

Nervous agencies can, and should, embrace this change because, on the other side of the coin, a whopping 80% of clients with in-house creative resources would like to see a greater level of collaboration with external agencies.

This should be music to agency ears. Designers, even when they have completed and signed off a project, care and carry on caring how the brand identity they’ve created, will fare ‘in the wild’. They’re seldom happy to just walk away from the project launch fanfare with some smart visuals and a case study for their own website. Call it control freakery, but what they fear most when they complete a rebrand or brand refresh and pass the brand assets over to the client’s in-house team to manage, is that their concept, the Big Idea will be diluted or damaged through poor execution.

And this, of course, is a valid concern but, it doesn’t have to be this way. In-house and external resources need to find ways to play to their strengths, create symbiotic loops between them, learn from each other and grow as a result.

The in-house team can share their industry insights and join the creative journey through points of co-creation. External specialists can share their knowledge of trends and skills as well as helping to build the in-house team’s capability and confidence for selling design and strategy into senior leadership and stakeholders.

The way a team plays as a whole determines its success. You may have the greatest bunch of individual stars in the world, but if they don’t play together, the club won’t be worth a dime.

Babe Ruth

Conclusion

Further evidence, should it be needed that, despite the rise of the in-house resource, design agencies are still very much valued comes from What Clients Think. Their findings reveal that 95% of clients with an in-house creative resource still see the value in using external agencies for particular challenges, typically for bigger, more strategic projects or where a fresh perspective is particularly called for.

It seems that we’ve reached a point where it’s not an either/or situation where in-housing and outsourcing come and go in cycles. The most impactful branding will be born from embracing the synergy between in-house and external specialists and ensuring we all become excellent collaborators.

Sometimes the biggest favour you can do your brand is not to go all out for a complete overhaul, throwing out the old and rebranding. A brand refresh that reflects how your organisation has evolved can be just as transformational. How far you should go – rebrand or refresh – only becomes clear once you’ve undergone a thorough brand review and clarified your positioning and brand strategy (the discovery stage).

For the purposes of this post we’re assuming that your current brand identity has some more than salvageable good stuff. The following illustrates what can be achieved with a more nuanced approach with reference to two projects we’ve recently completed: travel company, Discover the World’s brand refresh and the journey of brand evolution we took with national addiction services and mental health charity, WithYou.

1. Build on the big idea

Hold onto the conceptual thinking from the original design that still holds true for the newly defined brand strategy and expand on the best bits.

In both WithYou and Discover the World, the existing brand concept still held sway but certain elements needed refining, polishing and drawing out.

WithYou – the original brand concept incorporated a subtle nod to the name and the core organisational values of working alongside their clients. We ran with this idea, incorporating it as part of the wider brand system and drawing more attention to this values-led concept.

WithYou’s wordmark had been designed to represent unity and connection. The concept worked well but needed to be further emphasised in its application. We did this by taking the ligature (or linking path) between the ‘h’ and the ‘y’ letters, and using it as a visual device to frame and add dynamism to WithYou’s communications. We named this evolution of the existing concept, ‘the WithYou Pathway’. It demonstrates how WithYou works with their clients and partners – side by side, on a pathway to recovery.

Discover the World – during a discovery workshop the founder of the travel company mentioned that the bird in their logo was an Arctic tern, chosen because it flies from the North to the South Pole. It reflects the company’s origins and how they started out offering trips to the Arctic and Antarctic. We ‘brought the bird to life’ by freeing it from the constraints of the logo and bringing in a trailing flight path device. This conveys dynamism and draws the viewer’s eye to focal points in photography.

2. Take care of the details

Refine and improve the existing branding to better reflect the organisation’s present situation and future aspirations.

It’s always good to remind ourselves that brand identities help people navigate choices. As it takes time to build brand recognition – rebranding and rebadging is risky. If you change everything too fast (particularly with B2C brands) you risk losing that hard-earned brand equity. Sometimes a tweak is all that’s needed to reinvigorate and improve on the recognisable assets you already have.

Discover the World – our customer interviews highlighted an affection for the logomark (the ‘D’ motif): “the logo to me is very distinctive” “I love the Discover the World logo”. The original designers had cleverly used the Arctic tern in the logo to form the negative space in the ‘D’ letterform. We saw an opportunity to refine this idea, giving the bird a more dynamic look whilst making the link to the negative space in the ‘D’ more legible.

WithYou – we wanted to make it easier for the in-house design team to use the distinctive wordmark in sentences. They would have previously had to position the wordmark and then add type around it, something which proved difficult to get right and time-consuming so we took DM Sans (their off-the-shelf brand typeface) and customised it so that they could instantly create the wordmark and chosen typeface.

3. Re-evaluate colour and typography

Fashions change and trends come and go but some become embedded as the ‘new normal’. As brands become increasingly digital-first with less commitment to print, there are opportunities to be freer and zingier with colour.

Discover the world – the marketing team were naturally following the guidelines they’d been provided with but could see that their ‘new kids on the block’ competitors seemed to be bolder and more confident in their use of colour. We saw this as an opportunity to refresh the Discover the World palette and increase their appeal to a younger generation.

WithYou – during extensive brand perception research we found that people found the overall aesthetic of the brand to be cold – a far cry from the reality of their work and the hope, warmth and positivity they bring to the people they help. We warmed the palette subtly, introducing a buff colour to reduce the amount of white and introducing a more varied colour palette for use in illustrations.

Discover the World – the choice of a typeface says far more about a brand than we may consciously realise. The typefaces chosen in the original brand system were classic but static and we saw an opportunity to replace the primary typeface Melior with Buenos Aires whose round letterforms and quirky serifs give the identity a friendlier, more contemporary feel.

Their given body copy typeface was utilitarian so we replaced it with a more editorial face, a contemporary serif face: Span.

4. Reimagine use of photography and imagery

As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words, and both photography and imagery are powerful ways of communicating meaning and brand essence. Once you find or determine a style or set of parameters when commissioning photography and choosing images for your brand, it’s important that everyone sticks to it, to ensure brand consistency.

WithYou – the original brand identity incorporated line drawings and gave free reign to the national offices to commission their own illustrations. The result was a smörgåsbord of styles, with no way of recognising these as illustrations from the same brand, something which weakened brand recognition. We created a library of illustrations, primarily for their social media activity.

WithYou – using real photography of WithYou’s clients had been actively avoided, meaning the brand had ended up with a somewhat faceless and cold identity. Recognising that there is so much power in the human stories and lived experiences of their clients and team members, we took time to define and test how people felt about different styles of photography, and provided clear guidance on commissioning and selecting such photographs.

5. Rearticulate your tone of voice and messaging

A brand identity is never just visual; how you speak, what you say and how consistent you are, are critical elements too.

Discover the World – so that it could truly reflect the values, mission and vision the brand was founded on and lives by, we ran a comprehensive research and discovery stage that saw the teams getting more specific about what makes Discover the World special. Through this we identified and articulated the tagline, Always exploring. These stages also helped us tease out the company values and develop tone of voice guidance that better reflected the brand’s playful spirit of adventure. A series of Values in Action workshops for all 80 members of the Discover the World team helped ensure these were embedded across the business.

WithYou – the warmth and sense of familiarity we’d harnessed through refining the brand’s visual elements were further enhanced by capturing WithYou’s brand essence in their new messaging. This focuses on how WithYou is: ‘On a journey, side by side: with their clients, supporters, colleagues and commissioners’. A distillation of their mission, purpose and vision, it serves as a guiding concept, underpinning how WithYou uses the brand and intends for it to be experienced.

Summary

Although a brand refresh may seem less wholesale in the first instance, the subtlety and nuance that can be brought to bear is no less transformational. Far from being an ‘easy’ option it requires just as much commitment and digging deep.

Start with a comprehensive brand review and set your strategy in the discovery stage to see if it might be the right path for your brand. If you home in on the five elements identified, you’ll have all the brand touchpoint bases covered and a powerful new brand identity that will support your business or organisation going forward.

An imaginative approach

Somerset Community Foundation were already well aware that a strong brand identity could help build their profile, increase funding and enable them to do more good work. But, in common with other small charitable organisations, they were concerned about budgets, knowing that any form of rebranding exercise represents a significant investment in time and money. Although the funds community foundations regularly disburse are often large amounts, they’re restricted in how much they can use for non-grant giving activities such as marketing and communications. Rather than cut corners, we were going to have to be creative in how we approached the task so that we could achieve the best outcome for the budget available.

This post outlines some of the ways smaller charities can work with a branding agency to get the best results. Needless to say, there are useful tips here that will work just as well for larger charities too.

Branding tips for smaller charities

Engage the collaboration gear

Everything about the rebranding exercise will go better if you get the chief exec and trustees involved from the get-go. From writing and agreeing the RFP, to including a small cohort in a core steering group, this approach, although it might seem counter-intuitive at first, will help you avoid the dreaded ‘design by committee’ headaches that might crop up later on.

An engaged group that has followed the process from start to finish will, in my experience, be more inclined to push for the best and most strategic solution, and resist the urge to dilute through small changes – otherwise known as death by a thousand cuts!

Sell the need for change

Some staff and trustees may think that rebranding is purely a superficial, cosmetic exercise, one that distracts from the importance of delivering the charity’s mission. This is one of the reasons why it’s important to take the time to communicate why rebranding matters. Help people to understand that building a brand is not just about brand colours and the shape of the logo but that it goes much deeper than that – to a level of values, behaviours, vision and strategy. Use examples and case studies of past charity rebrands with stats and testimonials to show the positive all-round impact a refreshed brand identity can have.

“This was a significant investment for our organisation, both financially and in terms of the time involved as a small team. It was crucial for us to get our Trustees, Senior Leadership Team and wider staff team on board with the process from an early stage. While it was clear to all of us that the way we looked was outdated, we also really had to help everyone understand what brand means beyond the visuals. We had to show them how this work would help us better understand our stakeholders, grow the funds we raise for our communities and, ultimately, better deliver our mission.” – Laura Blake, Philanthropy Director, Somerset Community Foundation

Build on firm foundations

Spend time on setting out the strategic direction for the brand before jumping into the creative element of the work. It might be tempting to ‘DIY’ at this stage – only briefing the branding agency once you’ve defined your positioning, vision, mission and values yourself. But this is, after all, their area of expertise. Skipping their involvement and supposedly saving yourself time and money at this stage is a false economy – any short-term savings will be far outweighed by opportunities lost. You can ask them to review and rearticulate what you define but, in a perfect world, you’ll get them to lead from these research stages.

Share the load

Assuming you need to save costs, ask your consultant or agency about what you can do to share some of the research tasks. You need to acquire a full understanding of what your audience cares about and what resonates with them. One really great way to do that is to gather insights from your stakeholders by running short brand perception interviews. In a perfect world, these would be carried out by a professional consultant, ideally an independent or someone from your chosen branding agency. Having these carried out by a neutral, third person means that the interviewees are likely to be more open and unguarded in their responses. But, where budgets are tight, getting your brand design consultant to conduct a handful of interviews and then arranging for someone in the charity to run the rest is a good solution. In this case, ask your consultant to share the questions they’re asking so that you’re both able to follow the same format.

“Whilst we do an annual survey of key stakeholders, we’d never done stakeholder interviews and they were so revealing. We gained such a wealth of insight and deepened our understanding of our value proposition. We could see the trust our donors have in us and the credibility we’ve built and that gave us a huge confidence boost as a team, as well as encouraging us to be ambitious about growing our income and impact in the future.” – Laura Blake, Philanthropy Director, Somerset Community Foundation

If budgets are too tight for 1:1 interviews – run surveys. By making use of free tools like Google Forms, they’re a relatively cheap way to gather insights which, if not quite as valuable as those from interviews, will still be useful.

Include all voices

As well as taking in the views of your direct stakeholders, staff, trustees and donors, you need to consider how your beneficiaries will respond to a refreshed brand identity. Naturally, inclusivity is likely to be a key ethos within your organisation, so evidence-gathering and consultation stages with beneficiaries is a step that should ideally not be skipped.

Run a single or a series of focus groups, inviting several beneficiaries in a room or online (if they’re comfortable with digital workshop software, such as Miro or Mural). Offer an incentive and provide space for people to share their stories, make new connections by, for example, working in pairs, and get your brand design consultant to facilitate group discussions with exercises.

Allow enough time

It takes time to build a recognisable brand and a brand identity is something that needs to last. One thing you can’t afford to do is to chop and change identities – either financially or in terms of building recognition through consistency. A brand identity built in a hurry will likely need fixing later (ask any founder of a startup – they’ll almost certainly have rushed getting to market, consequently needing to redo their branding not too far down the line). Don’t rush the process. Let the agency agree deadlines with you and then stick to them. Keeping to your milestones as regards, say, providing feedback, is as important as the agency’s schedule. They’re likely to be working on more than one project and so being able to plan resources is crucial to their business model.

Evaluate the final concept

How many opportunities can you build in for evaluating the design? If budgets and timescales allow, will you be able to test the final solution? I’ve written in-depth about this in an earlier blog post. Remember, not everyone you test the concepts on will have a full understanding of the strategic objectives or have your background knowledge so always ask yourself: what don’t they know and why are we testing this? Too many opinions can create indecision, so any evaluation step needs to be carefully managed.

Commission good quality documentation and templates

Don’t be tempted to scrimp on brand guidelines. A four-page PDF won’t cut it if you want your team and creative partners to stay on-brand. You’ll need to come up with detailed guidance that should typically, but not exclusively, include:

• Logo usage, variants and positioning
• Co-branding guidance
• Sub brands advice
• Colour, including proportional use and accessibility rules
• Typography
• Photography
• Placement and use of graphic devices/illustrations in the brand system
• Application examples

“We have to save money where we can and know that we need to use trusted freelance graphic designers to deliver our day-to-day comms. But we also didn’t want to hamstring their creativity or lose the consistency and essence of our new brand story – so clear and thorough guidelines were essential to us” – Sue Wheeler, Marketing Manager, Somerset Community Foundation

Commissioning the branding agency to produce a set of editable templates for internal use, not only maintains professional standards but also means the marcomms team don’t have to spend time making design decisions and can focus on the content.

Encourage a culture of collaboration

A rebranding project will almost certainly result in a new or refreshed website. Very rarely do branding agencies know as much about UX, technical accessibility, functionality and SEO as a specialist digital agency or developer. It makes total sense to work with more than one delivery partner. Connect them together – make sure they’re happy to be open and collaborate with each other.

If both the branding agency and the digital agency run a discovery phase, ask them if they can coordinate this stage. Typically, the branding agency will be ‘up first’ so encourage them to share their interview and survey questions. In this way the digital agency can ask them to include their questions if appropriate (meaning the exercise only needs to be done once).

“We worked with a separate agency for web and made sure from the start they were happy to work collaboratively to ensure they had a strong sense of our brand and kept true to the that during the build. Both Sue and our web agency Cognique worked brilliantly together.” – Laura Blake, Philanthropy Director, Somerset Community Foundation

Ask the branding agency and the digital partner to set time aside for a handover. This will give the brand consultant the opportunity to talk through their strategy, highlighting why their creative choices are important and answering any questions. Don’t just rely on handing over a brand guidelines document, expecting your partners to run with it.

Similarly, when the digital agency presents their first draft page designs, bring the branding specialists back in to the review process. The essence of what the new branding says about your organisation can get lost or misinterpreted however extensive your brand guidelines and thorough your plans and this is the perfect opportunity to keep things on track.

With bigger budgets, you’d expect the brand consultant to stay on board in a creative director role throughout the process, but by involving them at key milestones (as outlined above), you can ensure you have a cost-effective ‘light touch’ version of that.

Manage the trustee sign-off process

Project governance is something that you will have already carefully thought through. You and your agency partner will have agreed the number of steps in the reporting process to the senior leadership and board. Managing that final trustee sign-off and preventing a last-minute derailment is key to the success of the project.

If you choose to offer the trustees a choice of options – never put forward anything you couldn’t live with – it might get chosen. My personal preference, and how we worked with Somerset Community Foundation, was to refine and agree one concept and present that. Everyone doesn’t have to like it, but they do have to reach a consensus. Bring your creative partner into the meeting to be on hand to either present or respond to questions and concerns.

“I wanted Sue in the room, she has years of experience fielding objections and opinions. As it is, we didn’t have any issues, together we were able to demonstrate that the final solution was the right one, based on research and strategic decisions.” – Laura Blake, Philanthropy Director, Somerset Community Foundation

Embed and inspire

A successful rebrand is not something that’s cosmetic, touching only the surface of an organisation. The early stages of the project will have seen you going deep and defining your brand values. These can take time to bed in with staff so do consider running internal workshops to get people to think about what each value means to them individually, as a team and for your audience. Consider ways that you can bring your values into new staff onboarding processes (induction manuals) and performance reviews.

“The Co-Foundry provided us with a workshop framework so we could run this ourselves. It wasn’t perfect but it worked for us. You have to make tough choices when you’re working to a strict budget. I guess my advice would be to find a consultant or agency who are open to sharing and looking for ways to support you.” – Laura Blake, Philanthropy Director, Somerset Community Foundation

In summary

If you’re only going to take one thing from the tips listed, make it the following:

• Focus on being open and inclusive.

It might be tempting to keep any sort of branding exercise to a small group within the charity but if there’s one single thing you absolutely must do, it’s to involve people across the organisation and beyond. Keeping them informed will not only make the whole branding process run much more smoothly, it’ll also help achieve that all-important buy-in for your new branding.

“We want our team and trustees to be proud of our new identity. Taking everyone on the journey means they become true advocates for the brand” – Justin Sargent, Chief Executive, Somerset Community Foundation

Dream clients – not just a ‘nice to have’

Having dream clients is not just pie in the sky. Giving you and your team permission to define your dream client is a crucial element of nailing your brand positioning. When you take that leap into niching, you not only build your proposition around the value you add to specific clients but you give yourself a razor sharp new business strategy.

Saying who you’re for (and so, by definition, who you’re not for) gets you halfway there. Once you’ve established that, everything else starts to fall into place. Not just in how you market your brand but also in how you work. You’re able to hone your expertise because your processes, ideas and solutions flow from a deeper focus and you can take advantage of, and build on the patterns and themes you encounter time and again.

Of course positioning isn’t just about what you do and who you do it for, but these are an essential part of the wider equation that encompasses the thoughts and feelings people associate with your brand. These other positions are ‘softer’ (but still essential) associations around brand personality, story, values and promise. For the purposes of this post however, I want to focus on the what and in particular, the who.

Feel the fear but do it anyway

When I discuss this with my clients there’s often a reticence, a fear of so tightly (and even loosely, in some cases) defining the ‘who’. This can take the form of, “Surely if we say we work with X we’ll miss out on working with Y (and all the other letters in the alphabet)’. But defining a strategy is all about making choices – it’s the reason I share this Michael Porter quote in every workshop I do:

Strategy is about making choices, trade-offs; it’s about deliberately choosing to be different.

By allowing yourself to become selective, you become sought after. You become known for a specific and readily identifiable value proposition expressed with a clarity that’s integral to attractive positioning.

Where the F do you start?

Once you’ve defined your perfect client you can qualify opportunities as they arise – YOU can choose as well as be chosen.

How to define your perfect client

Get clear on WHAT you do (best)

People came to my last agency wanting a range of services. We offered brand identity, web design and development, retained graphic design, illustrated books, pretty much anything other than packaging. Over time, I realised that I wasn’t enjoying the work as much as I should have been, and that I wanted to focus on brand identity and strategy more. I had to make some tough choices, one of which was to drop a whole revenue stream of web development work. When I came to reposition my agency I started with what we did or rather, what we wanted to do more of. And that meant dropping a few things. By going ‘niche’ you can go deep, extend your knowledge, build a specialism and develop expertise that is appealing as well as effective. It also changes who might be looking for those services.

Get clear on your WHY

Work is a big chunk of your day. It’s said that the average person spends 90,000 hours at work, so knowing what gets you up in the morning and understanding why you’re driven to help a certain group of people is hugely important. The Co-Foundry’s ‘why’ or purpose is to help organisations that strive, to build brands that thrive. Knowing that, means knowing who I want to help – the strivers, the purpose-led people.

Get clear on WHO you work best with

One of the most powerful and immediate ways of defining a position is by picking a sector. This isn’t always easy. It might even mean dropping an area you’ve done a fair bit of work in, something that can feel risky. However, the benefits of niching down to a particular sector are many. Not only will you gain a deeper understanding of the problems and desires that run through the sector but you’ll build marketplace intelligence and become known by, for example, attending specialist conferences and being active on industry-specific media. Your new business strategy may benefit too, as people moving organisations will take you with them.

Another way of selecting a client type is by focusing on their issues, needs or traits. I took the decision to focus on creative and tech founder-led brands as I already had a lot of experience and knowledge in that space. As well as working with these clients, I’d personally experienced a lot of the pains and gains of creative and tech founders for myself so had a natural affinity with them. As time has gone on I have extended that criteria to encompass chief execs of charities. These two areas of focus have so much in common – namely, a genuine desire to make an impact and while the latter may not have skin in the game financially, they do, emotionally. Both groups care about their people, something that works well with another fundamental aspect of my proposition – co-creation which sees teams involved in decisions throughout the process.

Follow the energy

It sounds so obvious when you read it but, and this is fundamental – find people who energise you.

The late great Milton Glaser (in his talk entitled ‘Ten things I have Learned’) put it perfectly, exhorting us to avoid the people we find toxic:

You have spent some time with this person, either you have a drink or go for dinner or you go to a ball game. It doesn’t matter very much but at the end of that time you observe whether you are more energized or less energized. Whether you are tired or whether you are exhilarated. If you are more tired, then you have been poisoned. If you have more energy, you have been nourished. The test is almost infallible and I suggest that you use it for the rest of your life.

Making the change

Although the word ‘dream’ is liberally sprinkled throughout this post, there is nothing airy fairy about how you go about identifying, approaching and working with the sort of clients that tick all your boxes.

Nothing should be left to chance. In the same way that you will have interrogated your brand closely when defining what you’re looking for in your dream client, testing your various hypotheses is key: For example, looking back over your income and client profitability, reviewing your marketplace and testing whether there’s a market for the people and businesses you’re looking to serve – too big and you’ll be one of many fish, too small and there may not be enough opportunities. And don’t forget, of course, listening to your gut!

In my case, as I was niching my entire offering (not just who I did it for), I needed to find partners to help me deliver the things I wanted to drop. In practice this took the form of building a trusted network of digital agencies and freelancers.

All of these changes – choosing to focus on brand strategy and identity for tech-based and creative founders, and third sector organisations, and building a network of collaborators – needed to be reflected and communicated in my own brand. This meant a new brand name, a full rebrand and marketing tailored to the new positioning and business model.

Leading with ‘no’

Getting comfortable with saying ‘no’ is fundamental to making this approach work. Ideally, you don’t want anything to derail you from the sort of ‘dream client’ strategy that will lead you to doing your best work and make you happy.

I’ll leave the last words to author, speaker and advisor, David C Baker. His 2017 book, The Business of Expertise is seen as a blueprint for entrepreneurial experts who want to make better business decisions. He identifies ‘smart positioning’ as the foundation stone of becoming known as an expert:

Positioning is a deeply wasteful exercise. It’s driven by saying “no” more than saying “yes” as you decide how to proceed with courage.

If you carve out an expertise business that fits who you are, takes advantage of your strengths, and minimizes your weaknesses, it’s more sustainable. That’s good for you, for obvious reasons, but it’s good for your clients, too, because you’ll be around to help them over a longer period of time, getting better at it as time passes.

Sitting on the ‘other side’ of the table proved to be both interesting and a little daunting. It was definitely a good thing to do because I now have some idea of how it feels to be my client! One of the most important things I did during this process was define my market – who I was a good fit for. In The Co-Foundry’s case, it’s mission-led organisations – founder-led, privately-owned tech and creative businesses, and third sector organisations.

And the first lesson I learnt? As I wrote back in the summer of 2021, defining the ‘who’ makes you much better able to articulate your ‘why’ because both you and your ideal clients care about the same things.

An entrepreneurial heritage

Looking back, I can also see that the connection with founders goes deeper than the discovery stage of my own rebrand. Although I’d never really connected the dots before, I come from an entrepreneurial family, from a grandfather who was a tomato-grower on Guernsey to a father who started his own business in his 40s, not to mention the years I spent running my design agency. I guess you could say that I get it – that need to establish and run a business to your own special recipe.

I can’t deny that working directly with founders offers some significant and immediate advantages – you get to sit shoulder to shoulder with the decision-makers, you can be pretty sure that your creative won’t be subject to the dreaded design by committee revisions and, because you already know they’re not averse to risk, a bold design approach, when appropriate, is more likely to be embraced.

But more than that, their having ‘skin in the game’ and being so focused on the longer-term means there’s something very special about working with founders. Perhaps it’s similar to the difference an architect or designer encounters when they work with someone who’s after creating their dream home rather than just an investment vehicle.

They love what they do

I love what I do. For me, it’s not just work but a driving passion and so it’s no wonder that I relate to others who love and care for their businesses too. These are people who want to get it right, who recognise they can’t do it all themselves and so build a team and a culture, and through that a future that demonstrates these wider ambitions.

The mission-led businesses I work with embody their founders’ singular vision. They’ve developed something that meets a need or solves a problem in a way that delights their customers. It’s something they keep top of mind but may have trouble articulating and reflecting in their branding. But of course, that’s where a good brand consultant comes in…

They’re creative (even if they don’t always know it)

Design is easily identified as being part of the creative economy but, to my mind, entrepreneurship and being a founder is (no matter what field you’re in) a profoundly creative act.

As Bernie Goldhirsh, founder of Inc magazine said, creating a business from nothing is ‘a kind of artistry…based on an ability to see what everyone else is missing.’ He also believed that entrepreneurial management required far more creativity from a founder than the grounding in rational skills that traditional management courses teach.

There’s a buzz

I found that reading Bo Burlingham’s book, Small Giants: Companies that Choose to be Great instead of Big really chimed with my thinking. In the same way that I see the founder-led companies I’m lucky enough to work with, Burlingham identified the ‘small giants’ in his book, as working to more than just financial objectives, ‘They were also interested in being great at what they did, creating a great place to work, providing great service to customers, having great relationships with their suppliers, making great contributions to the communities they lived and worked in, and finding great ways to lead their lives.’

All of this drive, enthusiasm and purpose means founder-led companies have a buzz about them, something that the book refers to as a state of being ‘totally in sync with [your] market, with the world around [you] and with each other.’ Getting your branding and values aligned is vital in maintaining this consistent emotional connection with your customers, team and community. It’s why our Values in Action workshops are so popular with the founders and third sector organisations we work with. The workshops ensure that branding is more than skin-deep – it becomes a code of conduct that’s embedded and lived by.

They understand that things take time

It seems that founders have quite a few things in common with branding consultants: They understand the importance of having a perspective or point of view on their market and a value proposition they believe in.

As Danny Meyer of now, not so ‘small giant’, Union Square Hospitality Group, points out, ‘At first, [your value proposition] is a monologue. Gradually it becomes a dialogue and then a real conversation. Like breaking in a baseball glove. You can’t will a baseball glove to be broken in; you have to use it. Well, you have to use a new business, too. You have to break it in. If you move on to the next thing too quickly, it will never develop its soul.’

They may be driven to succeed, but founders understand that brands take time to bed in – that brand-building is a long-term strategy – because they’re in it for the long term too. This makes working with them hugely rewarding, not least when you see how a rebrand revitalises a business or helps take it in a new direction.

How The Co-Foundry helps founder-led businesses

Our collaborative approach to working with our clients is in our name. As The Co-Foundry we work closely alongside our clients because we believe that branding is never something that is imposed or done ‘to you’. Our process is comprehensive and thorough and, as we’re reliably informed, time and again, great fun – with the workshop stages offering a chance for teams to bond and remind themselves of why they do what they do.

Over to the founders…

The clients we’ve worked with put it much better than I ever could (or should!):

Our new branding and messaging communicated that providing an ongoing, long-term relationship was central to how we work and this made what we offer different to what he’d get from another recruitment company. And that is exactly what we’d wanted to portray. I feel confident we’ll get a tenfold return on our investment over three years and, in addition it’ll stop us losing business.

Alan Furley, ISL Talent

We have true standout now. Before, we looked and sounded like any other web dev company – we needed to be bold, express our opinion and demonstrate our personality. we’ve got that now and it’s really getting us traction.

Simon Best, CEO, BaseKit

Together we were able to bring some much-needed clarity to our positioning and identity. I’m thrilled with the results and can’t wait to continue growing the business from the solid base they have helped us build.

Harry Cobbold, Unfold (digital agency)

You can’t be for everybody

As the saying goes, you can’t be all things to all people. Finding ‘my people’ – the clients I most enjoyed working with, that I could bring the most value to, has been the most liberating of the changes I made when I went from design agency to brand consultant.

Niching down and targeting founders (as well as mission-led third sector organisations) has not only increased my job satisfaction, it’s also helped me refine my processes and make more of my voice in the industry. And for those who might think that working with the same type of people is repetitive…?

Every client is different and so requires a carefully tailored approach. What your clients do all get to benefit from, when you niche down, is someone who truly understands their concerns and issues, and the values that are important to them. The patterns I see emerging add greater depth and meaning to the work we’re able to do with our clients, and so make for better branding all round.

We’ve been met by this request from charities looking to grow their donor base, cultural institutions wanting to increase their audience numbers, as well as travel companies seeking to attract a new, more adventurous customer.

Age is, of course, just one demographic and it would be vastly over-simplistic to assume there’s a single persona or set of distinct characteristics per generation. However, age often determines shared cultural references and preferences and, based on common lived experiences and social norms, these can be very helpful when reviewing your brand identity in a bid to give it broader demographic appeal.

Find out what you don’t know

It’s vital to go into the evidence-gathering step of your review with an open mind. Having a hypothesis is helpful but being open to learning from and responding to your findings is even more useful. Your brand may be long established and the people working in your organisation may feel they have a strong sense of what works, but switching the focus to discovering what it is that they don’t know, is key to broadening brand appeal.

Get to know the different generations within your audiences. Run brand perception interviews and surveys: Where do these groups hang out? What do they care about? What brands are they attracted to and why?

Once this leg of the research is complete, your brand design consultant will analyse how different generations perceive your brand (if indeed there are distinct differences), for example, the various motivations and needs your brand fulfils for them, the visual trends that attracted them to you in the first place. But they won’t just be looking for differences – the gold dust lies in the common thread that spans generational variations.

Look for a common thread

So, rather than focusing solely on the differences and building out of that, what you should be looking at is the glue that unifies generational appeal – the shared aesthetics, values and experiences. For example, while opera itself does not have as big a following among Generation X as it does with Baby Boomers, both generations share a love of and enthusiasm for live music in unusual venues.

Avoid stereotypes but seek patterns

Clearly defined generational groupings are becoming more blurred than in the past. But that doesn’t mean that creatives shouldn’t be on the lookout for patterns. Assumptions can easily be wrong and, as I said at the start of this post, age is only one demographic – contained within which is both nuance and a multitude of individuals.

In order to create truly resonant design, it’s essential that you ask your brand design consultant to conduct targeted market research, gathering feedback from the specific demographic you’re looking to target.

If forced to generalise, I’d start with the generational classifications below (intentionally focusing on years of birth from 1946 to 2012), with a reminder that these only refer to the age demographic. As soon as you start adding in any number of other factors, such as socio-economic, cultural or geographic considerations, their relevance wanes. Also key, is the fact that even within these generalisations, trends change and it’s the designer or consultant’s job to research audiences thoroughly – identifying what they like, what they care about and what other brands are competing for their attention.

Even the above, highly generalised timeline of the generations reveals common threads and trends that filter down through the generations. These sort of shared elements will be even more apparent when you drill down and get more sector, market and product or service-specific.

Design a flexible brand language

Once you have a strong sense of what will work, keep your core brand language (logo, colours, typography etc) consistent but don’t be afraid to vary your visual and verbal tonality and volume depending on who you’re speaking to. As an approach, this calls for a brand system that is adaptable; for example, one where you consider using pairs of typefaces – for example, one that’s contemporary alongside one that’s more classic. It’s important to provide detailed guidance on how and when to use the brand system to achieve the particular tone or effect you’re after.

Beware the risks change can bring

When embarking on change of this sort, it’s important that you don’t forget your existing audiences and loyal followers. Is a full rebrand really necessary? Too much change can alienate a possibly more conservative audience. As with any branding exercise, consider what will work for everyone, what assets can you retain or subtly evolve? Is it really necessary to start from scratch?

Good design comes first, and lasts

Just as a good song can be loved across generations, good design will resonate with a broad spectrum of people. While awareness of generational likes and dislikes is important, don’t just chase trends – seek out good design solutions that will bring your brand identity lasting-power and longevity.

Take people with you

Whatever path you end up taking, when you’re looking to make changes that extend generational appeal, you have to ensure that you communicate the reasons behind the change – why it’s important to the success (maybe even survival) of your brand. Ensure that every stakeholder and every member of the team, from front-of-house, customer-facing individuals to those behind the scenes as well as your trustees, volunteers, partners, customers and clients, understand why it’s being done.

This is where the evidence-gathering and consultation steps come into their own. They give you the confidence to prove that you haven’t acted on a hunch but have fully engaged with your audiences both ‘old’ and new.

Authenticity is everything

One value whose importance spans the generations, from Baby Boomers to Generation Z, is authenticity. Being authentic and not forcing your brand into an identity that isn’t a true reflection of what you stand for, builds trust, respect and a strong reputation, as well as making you relevant and relatable.

If we think of it in terms of people in the public eye that we might be familiar with… Sir David Attenborough and Sue Perkins are very different but, in being true to themselves and allowing their personalities to come to the fore, they are able to garner cross-generational appeal. Brands, in this instance, are not that different from people.

There’s understandable anxiety around throwing good money after supposedly bad. After all, something hasn’t worked out with the not-so-long-ago completed branding. There’s also an awareness that they might not want to scrap everything and start again – throwing away what’s valuable (their brand baby) out with the bath water.

Under scrutiny

And it’s not as if I haven’t been at the sharp end of this myself…

As well as being the brand consultant brought in to assess a supposedly faltering brand identity, I’ve also found myself on the receiving end. I was recently told that a rebrand we’d completed no more than six months earlier, following months of research and discovery, and an extensive design process, was being scrutinised by an agency owner invited in by the company group.

Confident that this was a definite case where the client would have done better to steady their nerves and give the rebrand more time and support, I thought the experience presented an opportunity to write about the subject of how you can achieve a level of certainty about determining what the problem actually is, and the solution that’s called for.

The question is, do you actually need that full-scale rebrand or something altogether more nuanced?

Give it time

First of all, it’s important to remember that the sort of changes a successful rebrand can yield don’t happen overnight. Chopping and changing things only causes confusion and damages your brand equity. Branding is never a case of ‘done and forgotten’ because you shouldn’t leave your brand to fend for itself out in the wild.

A brand not only takes time to bed in, it also requires you to actively check in on it. Checking-in might include a number of elements such as examining whether the intentions set at the outset are being realised and assessing how the rebrand is landing with audiences. It’s an important exercise because all sorts of outside influences, from the wider economic and cultural, to the sector-specific, will be having an impact on the fortunes of your brand.

But of course, when doubts remain and the checking-in exercise yields more questions than answers, it’s probably time for a brand review. ­

What is a brand review?

A brand review is a comprehensive, 360° audit of the state of your brand. It asks a whole range of questions, from those that are external-facing (Has the world shifted? Do you need to evolve with the changing cultural landscape?), to those that concentrate on looking at what’s going on inside your organisation (Have you developed a new service? Has your business strategy or positioning, i.e. where you stand in the market, changed?).

A brand review will help you find out if there really is a problem and will articulate any issues precisely. This means that you’ll discover if a full rebrand is on the cards or whether something more nuanced is called for – a minor adaptation perhaps, or maybe just more time for your brand to become known in its new guise. And, if there is a fundamental problem, it’ll help you determine the direction your rebrand should take you in.

So, if you’re being plagued by doubts about how your brand is doing, particularly if it’s not that long since you last rebranded, or if you’re worried that you seem to head for the drawing board at the first sign of trouble, read on to find out how taking stock and conducting a brand review worked out for one of our clients.

Getting to the heart of the matter

Recent months saw us working with a charity client that had fundamentally changed their way of working, from focusing solely on end-user beneficiaries, to expanding their focus to take in both end-users and service commissioners and partners. Their existing brand identity wasn’t able to accommodate or resonate with these two distinct audience groups.

In addition, the client was experiencing issues with brand application – brand rules were being broken and they didn’t know why. We were tasked with finding out how the changes that were necessary (i.e. evolving existing branding so it was meaningful to both its distinct audiences) could be introduced as smoothly as possible, ensuring the sort of consistency that would build the brand awareness they were after.

This is how we went about it:

Next steps – our client’s experience

Our findings unearthed additional evidence to back up the client’s initial prognosis while revealing further opportunities to get their branding to land right, once and for all, without having to embark on a full rebrand.

Their target audience had felt the existing branding and messaging lacked warmth and depth, and there was uncertainty about what the brand stood for.

The brand identity felt too playful and flippant.

The inconsistent brand experience was revealed to be a result of limited brand guidelines which meant that the charity’s regional offices were being given insufficient direction.

You don’t always need a revolution

It’s not always necessary to make a radical change. In our charity client’s case, it was a matter of the brand identity evolving so that it could accommodate the way the charity itself had evolved. As well as this, the brand system needed to be documented in a more thorough and user-centric way.

Rebranding would have been a case of throwing ‘the brand baby out with the bathwater’. The brand review findings presented the client with the ideal opportunity to step back from their brand and gain a deeper insight into how it was being perceived by their audiences. They were then able to make an informed choice on how to proceed.

Benefitting from a change of perspective

One of the most significant things which the client took from our brand review was that there is such a thing as being ‘too close’ to the brand.

Of course, it’s great when people say things like, ‘we live and breathe the brand’ but it does mean that they’re more likely to get bored with it and therefore want to change it. Stepping back and seeing the brand from the point of view of their audience, enables a reboot. For the people they want to reach, familiarity with a brand creates not only trust but preference. It’s cognitively easier to choose something you’re already aware of and have built an association with.

This is a phenomenon that was identified in the 1960s by social psychologist Robert Zajonc as the ‘Mere Exposure Effect’. More recently, via the work of Byron Sharp and Jenni Romaniuk of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute of Marketing Science, it’s referred to as the concept of ‘mental availability’ – something which is reduced when you continually meddle with your brand.

Getting the right people to ask the right questions

Discomfort or dissatisfaction with how a brand identity is performing should prompt questions. The important thing is to keep calm and examine what’s behind any motivation for change. Is it being driven by external or internal factors, or a combination of both?

Once you understand that, you have a better chance at arriving at a solution that doesn’t undo existing brand equity. Being mindful of who you get in to assist in this, also helps. Agency owners come with an inbuilt interest in advocating for ‘radical change’, i.e. a full rebrand. An independent consultant is more likely to direct you towards what you actually need. Paraphrasing the saying, ‘less can be more’ – a subtle change might just be the powerful solution you’re looking for.

Now, go a little further down the line, your creative agency has just presented you with their vision for your brand identity. Your first feeling might be one of elation but what comes next often goes a little like this…

Cue, path-blocking objections and concerns: ‘Is this creative original?’ ‘Haven’t I seen something like this before?’ ‘Will it last longer than the last brand identity we did?’ ‘Is it too ‘now’, of its time and faddy?’

Or, your elation might have frozen you to the spot with thoughts along the lines of, ‘This is fantastic, how can we make sure we own it, protect it, maintain it and build its value?’

You may even vacillate between the two and that’s ok, because there are a lot of factors at play here. Change and uncertainty are not meant to feel comfortable but you have to accept that this sort of discomfort is all part of the process.

They want proof that this is really, really gonna work. The problem is there isn’t proof. It’s [down to] how people see and perceive and accept things.

Paula Scher, Pentagram

As with any blocked path, it’s worth taking small steps to overcome the obstacles, so let’s break those reactions and conflicting emotions into three categories and take them on one at a time:

1. Originality
2. Trends vs fads
3. Trademarks.

1. Originality

Why is the desire for originality or novelty so important? The purpose of originality is to be innovative, be the first, bring something fresh to the market, stand out and so ultimately gain an advantage. But can we ever truly be original and does it matter as much as we might think?

No discussion on originality is complete without this quote from Mark Twain:

There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations. We keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely; but they are the same old pieces of colored glass that have been in use through all the ages.

Mark Twain

And this of course stands true in the graphic design world of brand identities. Our visual language is naturally limited to what we can see: shapes, letterforms, pictographs and even colours. Seemingly infinite, they can only ever be grouped into a limited range. What makes them appear fresh, new and different is how we combine, express and apply them.

A colour wheel can be broadly broken down into 12 groups:

There are only a limited number of geometric shapes in the world:

When it comes to pictographs we can go back to prehistory to see how humans used them to communicate (Image: Robert Brewster Stanton in Glen Canyon, Colorado River about 1893):

While Mesopotamian ‘graphic designers’ were limited by their rudimentary tools, we too are restricted by the requirements of the digital world – forced to reduce shapes down to their simplest forms – which again reduces the opportunity for expression and detail, and therefore variation.

16px favicons are one of the smallest sizes a logomark needs to be legible at:

Original logomarks

Seeking to be distinct within your category is almost always a strategic goal. However, you may choose to take the opposite path – wanting to make your product or service feel familiar. In this case, you might don the clothes of more established brands, or borrow from and reimagine established industry norms.

For the purposes of this post though, let’s assume being distinct is your objective. If that’s the case, then a decision needs to be made as to how distinct you’re looking to be beyond the category you operate in. In my opinion, it doesn’t matter that, in the following example, Pepsi and Korean Air have remarkably similar marks. After all, they operate in significantly different spaces and look different in application.

In contrast, I think Meta has demonstrated a lack of imagination with their infinity sign. An infinity symbol in itself is naturally going to be part of our universal language and therefore often used, but in the tech world the symbol is overused. It also bumps up a bit too close to Virgin Media which is also active in the entertainment and digital spaces.

I never fail to be amazed that Gucci and Chanel arrived at such similar marks given that they sit side by side in the designer bag sections and perfume and make-up counters of department stores. Much has been written about the homogenisation of luxury brands – it’s a category that is ripe for some disruption.

Original motifs

Now let’s take the pictograph of a bird as an example. Covering a diverse range of sectors, the following brands don’t need to play or fight in the same commercial space.

And one poor soul – our trusty Twitterer has been unceremoniously knocked out of their nest – the owner clearly not recognising the value inherent in that now familiar shape.

Airlines are naturally drawn to the motif of birds in flight. So, while the use of a bird motif is not original, differences are communicated through the expression of that idea. Japan Airlines has used the stork in a roundel since 1959 ­– it feels culturally appropriate (a meaningful symbol in Japanese arts and culture), distinct and memorable. Clearly though, the airline category more broadly, could look further afield for inspiration.

When designing the identity for Skylark Media we were of course aware that using a bird motif was not an original idea in itself. Within that category however (video production studios), our research revealed that this could be an original approach, while incorporating the bird into the serif of the ‘K’ reinforced the fresh, new treatment of the motif. It would have felt remiss not to play on the film production company’s name.

Monograms

Inevitably any monograms (single letterforms) will have a shared resemblance. In this particular case, a Hong Kong fashion school and an Italian rail network are in no way in the same competitive space.

But it’s how these two brands are applied that also helps to differentiate them.

Naturally a fashion brand needs the freedom to evolve over time, and the agency Toby Ng Design has given the client the ability to change the branding as trends and fashions change. Genius!

And that leads us neatly onto our next category: trends vs fads.

2. Trends vs fads

If it’s classical timelessness you’re after, then selecting colours and typefaces that are long-established is a safe bet. To be super safe, choose to avoid stylised motifs, because even the expression of a motif can date.

However, if your brand strategy calls for a contemporary look and feel, one with broader appeal that’s possibly looking to attract a younger target audience, then you’ll want to be more ‘of the moment’, part of the zeitgeist. In this instance, your designers will need to walk that fine line between being on trend and referencing what might be a short-lived fad. So what’s the difference between trends and fads? A starting point is to look at the dictionary definitions for both each:

The danger of a fad is inherent in its dictionary definition. There are of course opportunities for short term campaigns to ride on fads, but as we’re exploring overarching brand identities here rather than focusing on one-off marketing campaigns, it pays not to take a short-term approach: Brand identity recognition, awareness and recall build and evolve over time, and there’s a danger that, in being so of the moment, one moment, you’ll appear dated in the next.

Trends come and go but this usually happens in much slower cycles than those around a fad. And very often their reference of the past is deliberate and strategic.

As shown in this Cisco ad, the use of dynamic ‘living lines’ feels very on trend. It isn’t a novel idea (see the example on the right from 1967) but its application does feel ‘of the moment’. I don’t believe it’s going away anytime soon either because it isn’t stylistically ‘out there’ in a way that might date it.

Distinguishing between a trend and a fad

Fads often emerge suddenly, gain rapid popularity and then quickly fade away within a short time frame (typically less than a year). Trends, on the other hand, tend to evolve more gradually and can persist over several years.

Trends are often rooted in societal shifts, changing consumer behaviours, or advancements in technology. They address underlying needs or preferences which can make them more sustainable over time. Fads are usually driven by novelty and excitement, and lack the substance to endure.

Trends tend to have a broader and more diverse appeal, attracting a wide range of demographics. Fads may have a specific target audience and appeal to a niche group for a brief period.

Ultimately, determining whether something is a trend or a fad requires a combination of observation and understanding of the broader context. It’s worth noting that even experts can sometimes make poor judgments, as the distinction between the two can be complex and influenced by various factors.

On trend or derivative?

There is a difference between designers being on trend and being directly derivative. However, with the echo chamber of Pinterest’s algorithm throwing out the same visual reference over and over again, this is happening more and more but through osmosis rather than because of deliberate copying. In this short video Derren Brown demonstrates how susceptible people are to the influences they surround themselves with:

However much they may be influenced by their industry or find the work of award-winning peers attractive, an established, professional designer is highly unlikely to copy an existing visual concept.

A good designer keeps their field of vision wide.

Build in checks and balances

A professional designer will factor due diligence into their practice, alongside researching the client’s category.

3. Trademarks

This post is not written with FTSE 100 corporations in mind, it’s aimed at third sector organisations and SMEs with more limited budgets – organisations and people with a dynamic mindset and a more pragmatic approach.

Of course, if you’re CocaCola or a similar concern such as Intel, you would go so far as to register the shape of your bottle or audio identity. But do you need to formally register your identity?

Before you file your design application – ask yourself, is a trademark Totally Meaningless™ or Really necessary ®. Once you’ve registered it, will you maintain an enforcement strategy, monitoring any conflicts and infringements? If you aren’t prepared to invest in monitoring and enforcement, is there any benefit to registering?

In conclusion

A trend or concept that is familiar, tried and tested may make us feel more confident and reassured about the design direction. There’s nothing wrong with that. There is very definitely a sliding scale for designs – from designs that are novel (if not original) and challenge the norms, to designs that regurgitate fads – the graphic design equivalent of fast fashion. The balancing act is about reconciling the facility for sustaining an identity over the long term while satiating the appetite for something new and different.

Design decisions have to be made based on meaning and relevance. Rather than searching for originality ask yourself, is this on trend, a fad, or stylistically derivative? Does it feel true to our brand essence? Does it hold meaning? Paula Scher again, on authenticity and pushing the brand down a new path: “The goal is to make them look like them, but allow them to feel comfortable that they’re going out to the party. Not overdressed, not underdressed, they’re them. That’s what I care about. Raising it, creating a surprise, moving the needle.”

Designers and clients have a shared responsibility to widen their terms of reference – going beyond award-winning concepts in design-trade press, avoiding falling down Pinterest rabbit holes and arming themselves with knowledge of design history. Or, put more simply, looking up and drawing on inspiration and reference from all around you.