Truly Deeply/Madly

When it comes to updat­ing a brand find­ing the right look and feel for the brand is, nat­u­rally, vital. But find­ing the key expres­sions for the brand is just as impor­tant. Whether it’s for your cus­tomers, staff or the gen­eral pub­lic know­ing what the high­est value expres­sions your brand will make will go a long way to ensure the new brand is both well received and a suc­cess. Here’s the tail of a brand evo­lu­tion we did for SAGE Automation:

About the Client:

SAGE started life as a two man elec­tri­cal engi­neer­ing com­pany in 1994, when we met them they had grown to an Automa­tion spe­cial­ist with over 200 employ­ees, a list of Australia’s blue chip clients, a turnover of $40 mil­lion and a truly national pres­ence. The only issue was they had truly out­grown their cur­rent brand, both strate­gi­cally and stylistically.

For an engi­neer­ing com­pany one of the most impor­tant pieces of brand com­mu­ni­ca­tion is their Ten­der. For SAGE it was one of the dri­ving forces for an update. If the abil­i­ties and beliefs of the com­pany were not being expressed, the way a good visual brand sys­tem can, they are putting them­selves at a seri­ous dis­ad­van­tage when ten­der­ing. And win­ning ten­ders is the life blood to growth and sur­vival for a com­pany like SAGE.

Evolv­ing the Brand:

Nat­u­rally, we started out with a Strate­gic brand work­shop, with the exec­u­tive team, to get some sharper think­ing hap­pen­ing on the brand. From the work­shop we devel­oped a Brand Essences, Val­ues and Per­son­al­ity. These were then com­bined into a Brand book, a pub­li­ca­tion that records and explains the strate­gic intent of the brand.

Upon com­ple­tion of the brand book it became clear to the exec team at SAGE that their brand mark and visual lan­guage no longer lived up to their how they envi­sioned their brand. We we’re engaged to evolve the brand’s visual assets to a point where the brand mark would be a visual stan­dard for the pro­gres­sive and mod­ern busi­ness SAGE had become.

We present sev­eral steps from a con­ser­v­a­tive touch-up to a mod­ern cor­po­rate brand that could be a gen­er­a­tional leap. We we’re delighted when they backed them­selves (and us) and set­tled on what we thought was the best solu­tion but might have been too much of a change for them.

One of the few stip­u­la­tions of the evo­lu­tion was that the icon must stay, appar­ently it’s either a lathe bit, or a scythe. What ever it was is lost in the sands of time, the impor­tant thing is that it rep­re­sented SAGE since 2000 and is recog­nised by both clients and staff.

The Ratio­nal:

The new brand mark was cre­ated to have the visual lan­guage of a mod­ern inter­na­tional brand. The lathe bit became a counter cut out of a red sphere. Which delib­er­ately has an Asian feel, we wanted the brand to feel big­ger than an Aus­tralian brand. The logo­type, strong caps, in a mod­ern but friendly sans-serif. The A of SAGE is the Delta sym­bol Δ which to engi­neers means a change or the dif­fer­ence. This is then locked up with the Name of each of the dif­fer­ent com­pa­nies that make up the SAGE Group.

A key ele­ment of the visual lan­guage was the sphere ele­ments, a series of over­lap­ping translu­cent spheres, that can work as a sec­ondary brand­ing ele­ment and pro­vided the oppor­tu­nity to vary the level of brand­ing used on any com­mu­ni­ca­tion. The visual lan­guage for the brand extended to a series of metal­lic images, which help express the moder­nity the brand required and could be used in branded pieces while a new, more mod­ern pho­to­graphic library was developed.

The new iden­tity was then imple­mented across sta­tionery, uni­forms, liv­ery, sig­nage, pre­sen­ta­tions, brochures, web­site, the all impor­tant ten­der tem­plates and the SAGE Rac­ing Ute.

The con­clu­sion:

Not all brand expres­sions are of the same value. For SAGE, the look and feel of their ten­ders was the most value. For your brand it will prob­a­bly be some­thing dif­fer­ent. Know­ing what it will be, is the key to get­ting real value from your visual brand. Then using the 80:20 rule you can lever­age the other key points to super­charge your brand.

If you’d like to have a chat about how you can evolve your brand, strate­gi­cally and visu­ally, or tar­get your most reward­ing brand expres­sion, give us a call.

Tags: Brand, Brand Agency, Brand Design, Brand Experience, Brand Strategy, Brand-Storytelling, Corporate Image, Graphic Design Melbourne, Interior Design, Melbourne Brand Strategy, SAGE Automation

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009 at 4:40 pm and is filed under Brand Agency, Brand Design, Brand Strategy, Corporate Image, Creative, Graphic Design Melbourne, Our Work, Visual Language. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.