How to: Brand & Identity 12.16.13

How To: Refresh Your Brand & Identity

Customers don’t always like change. It can be frightening, and even worse; confusing. For software brands, where ease-of-use and simplicity is the driving niche, it can be an instant loss of an end-user. Take Fab.com for example; the designer home décor and gift flash sales site. After moving to a full price e-commerce model in December of 2012, a 75% drop in traffic was seen in the 10 months that followed. More widely publicized, we also have the infamous removal of the start button on Windows 8 that to nobody’s surprise was added back in the next point release update. What Microsoft failed to realize was that a major piece of the Windows brand was the start menu. Take that away and you’ve taken away a promise you’ve given the customer.

Revamping your brand and identity is no easy task. In many cases, if your business is already flourishing it can actually hurt you. In other cases, a complete throw-away of your old identity may be the electrical pulse needed to revitalize a model that was failing. Before you get started, it’s important to evaluate all of your brand elements prior to making this big change for your customers. From there, redesigning the ingredients of your identity is a creative process of consistency, integrity and allure. You’ll surely miss some things along the way, but reducing those to a minimum will close holes for upset customers and improve the perception of future prospects.

Revaluate What You Do

In January 2013, New Angle set off on an exciting quest to revise our brand and identity. After several major additions to our team as well as our offerings such as content marketing and software as a service (SaaS) solutions, it was determined that our brand needed a makeover to embellish the new foundation of our core business. This new foundation was to consist of three pillars; software, solutions, and studio. Our goal was to increase our client retention by presenting the company as a full service marketing technology agency, and most importantly; offering a more digestible format of services for new customers.

Visualize Your Brand

While many of our services independently remained the same, the perception of how customers understood our services is what we aimed to change.  Previously, customer identified our brand as one set of solutions such as the  “ Video Guys” , or the “Code Heads”.  With the three divisions of our business in place, we searched long and hard for a word that would guide the company into the future while resonating with customers as a niche of our business. This word was “Engagement”.  From this, we crafted a simple statement explicitly saying who we are and what we’re doing different; we create software, solutions, & studio productions to enhance online user ENGAGEMENT.

Conceptualize Your Identity

The hardest part of our brand and identity revamp was still yet to come. New Angle had a logo that remained unchanged for ten years. It was very important for it to maintain some of its core features. For this reason, it was initially decided that we would refrain from adding a separate branding icon  and focus on updating the font. We accomplished this with our  angled “A” in the presence of a lightly stroked rounded font. We maintained the color separation of “New” and “Angle” for consistency but chose to add more vibrancy by going to a brighter color pallet to symbolize the bold and  energetic approach we take in all we do. By far, the most daring change to the logo was the removal of the word “Media”. After much deliberation, it was agreed that our customers already identified us as “New Angle”, it rolled off the tongue more smoothly, and provided a cleaner look and feel.  Above all, we wanted to have a logo that represented the sophistication of our software, and the elegance of our creative marketing.

Embellish Your New Brand & Identity

With the brand and logo in place, our next frontier was the website, and all of our marketing materials. We consolidated the material on the website to the content people reviewed the most while implementing many strategies that we had been offering customers, but not practicing ourselves. This included responsive design, long home pages, and a sortable portfolio of all of our work. We also created a long term strategy for how we would position the brand on all social media networks, the redesign of our sales materials, and a checklist to update the brand identity on external sites for consistency. What we were left with was a vehicle that would take us far and beyond into the future.

Beware

Without concise planning, focus groups, case studies, and a strong reason to even consider a brand and identity revamp, it would be my advice to sleep on the idea. If it’s truly something you think your business should consider, call a professional marketing firm and get a second opinion. If they eagerly take your business without evaluating who you were, who you are, and who you want to be, they probably aren’t thorough enough to properly execute the job. After all, you wouldn’t hire your gardener to perform open heart surgery. With that said, a brand and identity overhaul should always result in more business. In the words of the Grail Knight in Raiders of the Lost Ark, “…choose wisely, for while the true Grail will bring you life, the false Grail will take it from you.”