Truly Deeply/Madly

The Story of the Truly Deeply brand iden­tity
It was shortly after the rela­tion­ship between Storm and BrandDNA was made offi­cial that we made the deci­sion. A deci­sion we felt we would rec­om­mend to any client in a sim­i­lar posi­tion. Stop wast­ing energy sup­port­ing two brands and focus your resources on one. It wasn’t that there was prob­lems with the old brands, we loved them, and still do. It was that we had a new offer, that couldn’t be suc­cess­fully rep­re­sented by one or the other. So nearly three years ago, on a plan­ning week­end down the Morn­ing­ton Penin­sula, we made the choice. It was time for Storm and BrandDNA to fade away and be replaced by a brand that truly rep­re­sented the new brand design ethos of the new company.

Now, rebrand­ing is always a dif­fi­cult process. A brand iden­tity is such a finan­cially valu­able and emo­tion­ally pre­cious part of any organ­i­sa­tion that chang­ing it is noth­ing less than a rebirth for that organ­i­sa­tion. Whether the rebrand is a cat­a­lyst for the change to come or the final flow­er­ing result of a period of evo­lu­tion, it will be a chal­lenge. There will always be key stake­hold­ers, opin­ioned inter­ested par­ties, med­dling well-meaners and gen­eral oth­ers who’ll need to be appeased to keep the process mov­ing for­ward. So, when it comes to rebrand­ing a cre­ative organ­i­sa­tion, the dif­fi­culty can increase expo­nen­tially, when it comes to a cre­ative brand­ing agency rebrand­ing itself it can get very, very challenging.

The biggest chal­lenge was that we’re all experts in brand­ing. Com­bined, we have hun­dreds of years of expe­ri­ence in brand­ing every con­ceiv­able entity. We know the strate­gies, we know the the­ory. We’ve cer­tainly got the prac­ti­cal expe­ri­ence. So we thought the rules we’re dif­fer­ent for us. We thought we could short-circuit the process, get straight down to cre­at­ing a next gen­er­a­tion brand for a next gen­er­a­tion brand­ing com­pany. Div­ing straight in cre­ated some inter­est­ing ele­ments but noth­ing of sub­stance we could agree on. We couldn’t see the for­est for the trees.

What’s in a name?
Hun­dreds. Hun­dreds and hun­dreds of names. We con­sid­ered thou­sands of names, some lasted sec­onds, some days, some months, one was even reg­is­tered, one nearly caused revolt, but none we’re right. The process lost momen­tum, we we’re dis­tracted by the day to day of cre­at­ing suc­cess­ful brands for every­one else and let our own brand­ing process slide. It wasn’t till we realised we we’re cheat­ing our­selves and our new brand, by not impos­ing the rigour and dis­ci­pline we apply to other brands. The first thing we tell any client is that to cre­ate a suc­cess­ful brand you need absolute clar­ity about what your try­ing to achieve. We thought we could skip it because we knew bet­ter. It reminds me of one of my dear mam’s say­ings ‘Nearer the church. Fur­ther from God.’

Being truly true
It was only when we gave the project the respect it deserved and our­selves the time to apply the process we’ve cre­ated to craft brands for our clients. We started to get results we really liked and results that were clearly bring­ing the brand to life. We had a brand essence, val­ues and per­son­al­ity we all agreed on. Our brand essence ‘A brand inspired design obses­sion’  set the stan­dard. We had a name that embod­ied the bal­ance of our cre­ative and strate­gic tal­ents, while res­onat­ing with the true emo­tional power of strong brand­ing. We became Truly Deeply. An organ­i­sa­tion obses­sive about cre­at­ing brands that evoke pow­er­ful emo­tional con­nec­tions with customers.

The brand­mark
Now we had our name and a great brand descrip­tor ‘Re-imagining Brands’ we needed to focus on the visual lan­guage that would bring our brand to life. Our brand decode process enabled us to have a strate­gic direc­tion as to the visual style the brand­mark should take. We con­ceived of a brand­mark with the tra­di­tional cues of blue chip con­sult­ing agency, soft­ened and embell­ished to reflect our cre­ative obses­sions. The brand­mark was crafted from Hubert Jocham’s beau­ti­ful Narziss Drops font (before Hubert cre­ated all the dif­fer­ent weights). To accom­pany the brand­mark we cre­ated a series of stun­ning illus­tra­tion, our menagerie of fan­tas­tic creatures.

The bes­tiary
I can reveal now, no ani­mals were harmed in this re-branding. These illus­tra­tions are the part of the iden­tity that really brings the brand to life. They’re mag­i­cal, intrigu­ing and have an artis­tic qual­ity. There’s a dif­fer­ent one on everybody’s busi­ness cards. They’re a nat­ural talk­ing point. For me, it’s their abil­ity to be inter­preted, some­times in sur­pris­ing ways, that keeps them fresh and enter­tain­ing. It’s funny, now, to think how con­cerned we were about them. We thought they could be too chal­leng­ing for our clients, too gory for some of the more sen­si­tive souls. But every one loves them, some clients col­lect them, want­ing to know if there’s more they’ve missed out on. I’ve only heard one com­ment in the months we’ve been using them about them being bloody, and that was from a local gov­ern­ment client nat­u­rally averse to any­thing not cer­ti­fied  polit­i­cally cor­rect. Here’s the full col­lec­tion for your view­ing pleasure:

If a job’s worth doing…

Cre­at­ing a great brand is a dif­fi­cult process. You can trim bud­gets and push bound­aries. But if you don’t do it prop­erly, with the respect and dili­gence it deserves, you can’t expect to get the results your brand deserves. Spend the time and effort at the start get­ting your strat­egy and think­ing resolved and the cre­ative will flow, form­ing a brand that will be a truly pow­er­ful expres­sion of your essence. If you’d like to talk to us about our brand­ing or yours give us a call.

Derek Car­roll
Direc­tor of Design
& Poker of Bears

Tags: Brand Agency, Brand Design, brand designer Melbourne, brand designers, Brand Identity, Brand Personality, Brand Strategy, Brand Voice, Brand-Storytelling, code of visual langauge, Corporate Image, Creative Ideas, Derek Carroll, Graphic Design Melbourne, Melbourne Brand Strategy, Visual Language

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