New brand – who dis?

The story behind Brand by Me’s brand refresh.

As a brand consultancy, we are frequently approached by organisations and businesses whose brand or branding has stopped working for them. In fact this is one of the main reasons people come to us. We even wrote a blog post about it.

As we often say, we practice what we preach. Brand by Me has changed a lot since we started in 2016. Our offer has evolved and is WAY clearer. We have a focused target audience of social change organisations, charities and ambitious purpose-led founders. And we are now a team.

So our brand was no longer fully working for us. Whilst our purpose was exactly the same and our name still totally reflects what we’re about, our branding didn’t quite communicate the value (or amazing impact) of what we do.

Luckily our friend and brilliant Creative Director, Thad Cox staged an intervention. He spotted that our branding needed a refresh and decided to help us out.

 

In his words:

“I love your branding. However it lacks sophistication and doesn’t communicate how talented and knowledgeable you are. Your branding needs to resonate with your audience and differentiate you from the competition. ”  

Yikes. He was right.

So we knew we needed to act. And here’s what we did:

1. A brand refresh – Thad refined our visual identity, keeping the concept and core colours of our look and feel but adding a sophisticated custom font, new bold supporting colours and redesigning our logo to capture the essence of our brand and make us stand out.You can see Thad’s brilliant brand refresh concept for Brand by Me here.We also revised our values and refocused our vision – check out our brand video here.

2. A new strategy – With our refocused vision and new look in place, reflecting who we are (and who we want to be) it was time to look at our audience and offer, as well as plan the tangible actions to help us achieve our vision and deliver on our purpose. So that’s why we did our strategy mastermind. And it worked!
   
3. A new website – Note the order of these 3 things. A new website was definitely in order. But we needed to update our brand and have our strategy in place before embarking on any web development. This is often something that businesses fail to realise – they start out on an ambitious website project without reviewing their brand or strategy and this means that the end result is not fit for purpose or future proof enough to make the website investment. worthwhile. By doing things in this order, our brand and strategy drove every decision we made during web development – from creating content to gaining clarity on our user needs. We worked with an amazing external Web developer, Dan Netherton, to build a custom WordPress site that’s totally own-able and looks brilliant but is easy for us to update and maintain.

 

This whole process has taken about 6 months. Which frankly is longer than we planned for and wanted, but we took the time to get it right and, full disclosure, we did let things slip a little when we had to manage competing priorities! 

Having done our own brand refresh, here are our top 3 tips:

1. Invest in the right people to bring your brand to life 

We are a brand and strategy consultancy, so it was key for us to bring in experts who could translate our vision and personality into a brilliant new brand and website. We used our brand framework to shape the website tender and evaluate responses and we invested the maximum budget we could afford. This was a massive priority for us so there was no point trying to cut corners. 

We also invested dedicated resources and time from our team to drive things forward and we made sure we freed up capacity by taking on fewer projects and shifting priorities so we could get this done. 

2. Start from your strategy 

There’s no point trying to make such a significant change unless you’re clear why you’re doing it and what you want to achieve. Your organisational strategy should help you focus on the must-haves and strip out anything that’s not essential (to avoid that dreaded scope creep). 

3. Expect and plan for delays

Even if you are (or have) the most amazing and rigorous project manager (thanks Danielle!), things will take longer than expected and circumstances beyond your control may cause your project to drift. So build in contingency but also have a really clear, accessible and visual timeline that allows you to keep track of timings and respond to delays. (we love Asana for this type of thing). 

We are delighted with the result of our brand refresh and we now have a really strong platform to go forward and do what we do best – help ambitious organisations tackle tough challenges and build brilliant brands!

If you’d like to talk to us about helping refresh and reinvigorate your brand, do book in a call!