To create one of the world’s top 10 neuroscience institutes, the Howard Florey Institute amalgamated with the Brain Research Institute and the National Stroke Research Institute to form Florey Neuroscience Institutes and become the largest brain research institute in the Southern hemisphere.

We were approached by Florey Neuroscience Institutes to promote a joint venture taken on by the group which was the construction of two new purpose-built state-of-the-art facilities worth $225 million. As part of the project,
the Mental Health Research Institute and University of Melbourne neuroscientists co-located with
Florey Neuroscience Institutes to the new facilities at the University’s Parkville campus and at the Austin Hospital in Heidelberg.

Florey Neuroscience Institutes needed a brandmark, visual language and brand communications (stationery, invitations and media banners) on which it could communicate the project. The project’s title ‘Melbourne Neuroscience Project’ positioned it as a one of a kind that will shape brain research for Melbourne and Australia.

One of the main objectives of the brandmark was to stand out on the worksites (Heidelberg and Parkville) hoarding, where it would be predominately used. The resulting design was inspired by the architectural form of the buildings and the idea that these two sites are the building blocks of something significant in brain research within Melbourne.

The Premier of Victoria John Brumby, Minister for Innovation Gavin Jennings, Federal Minister for Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, and local member for Jagajaga, Jenny Macklin and four
of the world’s leading experts in the neuroscience and mental health, Professors Colin Masters, Graeme Jackson, Geoff Donnan and Sam Berkovic turned the first sod for the $45 million Austin Neuroscience Facility.

We were approached by Florey Neuroscience Institutes to design their 2008 Annual Report. With a brief to update existing brand visual language, we developed a new brand look and feel that is scientific, professional and bold, that would be eventually rolled out through other FNI brand communications.

Through innovation, excellence, commitment, passion, integrity, rigour, collaboration and teamwork FNI are
focused to be recognised as a leading international brain research institute. With these values driving all they do,
we assisted Florey Neuroscience Institutes to define the key annual report communication theme as ‘Improving Life Through Brain Research.’

We provided a communication system that allowed FNI to highlight the relevant stakeholder messages in what is a complex piece of communication. The result is a very easy to comprehend corporate report that delivers the organisation’s key strategic and brand messages in an easy to access and engaging format.

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.

Branding a place or a region is no different to product or service branding – you have to own something that is distinctive and compelling to your target market. However, when it comes to regional branding there is an added complication. You have to balance the competing needs of a diverse set of stakeholders because the people and businesses that make up the region simply do not always see the world through the same lens. Different mental models, different types and sizes of businesses, different levels of self interest and all that before one even layers in the different egos at play.  A lot of stakeholders and lot of emotion makes for interesting branding.

With such a diverse range of stakeholders, the developers of regional brands need to adopt a strategic and pragmatic approach. For a start there needs to be recognition that not all stakeholders will be of equal value in building a world famous regional brand, that the 80:20 rule is well and truly alive. Certainly the team we worked with on the Eyre Peninsula in South Australia understood this point. Led by the regional Development Board, the regional branding process started with identifying those businesses that were considered mission critical to being on-board. Clearly your preference is to have everyone on board, but it can also be a very liberating feeling if instead you identify the 20% of stakeholders who will give you 80% of the bang, you can then immediately narrow your focus. And of course the law of attraction always works, enlist the shakers and movers and others will want to jump on board anyway. Once you have the right people involved there is a need to explore what makes up the region, what makes it a special place. Is it nature’s gifts, is it food producers, is it the unique experiences on offer, is it wine, is it a combination.

When we worked with the Eyre Peninsula there was no shortage of platforms that we could create a brand around, but we know that brands that wish to be a little of everything will eventually amount to a lot of nothing. We steered some deep and meaningful conversations and we landed on a very powerful proposition. Eyre Peninsula has seafood to kill for and it has a rugged pristine environment producing it. They could ‘own’ seafood and they could leverage the rich storytelling that their entrepreneurial and adventurous fishermen live and breathe everyday. But there was also a lot of other food related businesses that were not seafood centric. Grain and lamb producers, olive growers, wineries and much more, all great examples of excellent produce, but not unique to many other regions in Australia. They did not provide a strong enough point of differentiation.

What was required was a regional brand positioning expression that claimed ownership of seafood and at the same time provided a positive halo effect over the other food and tourism enterprises of the region. The solution came in the form of the following positioning line.’Australia’s Seafood Frontier’. By making it Australia’s Seafood Frontier the Eyre Peninsula claimed ownership of seafood in Australia and at the same time the word Frontier conjured up a feeling of wild, untamed and pristine
- all very positive attributes for the other food and tourism businesses in the region.

We then created a brand book (see example below) that articulated the regional brand values that
those responsible for delivering an on-brand experience, day-in and day-out, would have to live.
The brand values, essence and supporting narrative become a critical rallying point for aligning all
key stakeholders.

If you get the chance visit the Eyre Peninsula and experience Australia’s Seafood Frontier first
hand, you will not only have an amazing time, but you will get to fully appreciate the power of creating
a regional brand around something you can own!

Jane the Agency is a new brand of agency that takes a holistic approach to advertising. Jane are passionate about what they do and aim to nurture and inspire brands beyond their comfort zone, using both traditional and non-traditional mediums to form a deeper, more meaningful conversation with consumers.

We worked with Jane to create a visual identity that would sit comfortably within the visual language of the advertising industry, but that would at the same time stand apart and would attract like minded creative individuals and clients. Founded by Daniel Pollock, former creative director of one the top twenty creative agencies in Asia Pacific and co creator of iconic fashion website Michi Girl, Jane has a clear and playful brand personality which we have layered throughout all design and communication pieces. Shown below are examples of the business card, website and postcards design.

We’ve recently been working with Australia’s leading specialist Gen Y recruitment brand. We provided GXY Search absolute clarity around their market proposition and layers of brand definition to allow them to align and focus their brand and business activities. As it often does, this new-found clarity of the brand led to a brief to update the GXY brand identity.

From sport to fashion, lifestyle to advertising GXY’s clients all boast ‘excitement jobs’ – the type of jobs many Gen Yers dream about. One of the defining attributes of Gen Y is they see themselves as distinct individuals who belong to a range of overlapping tribes. GXY genuinely has a right to lead those tribes as it is authentically Gen Y itself, from the way it thinks to how it behaves and where it parties, GXY is Gen Y through and through. The brand identity we designed for GXY was a reflection of their own status within the Gen Y tribes they belong to. The brand identity concept was developed through our creative brand design process. The brand identity developed was applied to business stationery, interior design and website.

A New Model of Talent Management
Forum5 represents the next generation of artist and talent management company founded by Mark Richardson in collaboration with global media company; Fremantle Media. Mark’s background was in running some of the biggest record labels in the world, representing many of the biggest names in music internationally. Mark’s vision for Forum5, was a new kind of talent management based on the understanding that in the age of shared and social technology, the talent creating the content holds the power, and the ideal management relationship is an entrepreneurial partnership. With Fremantle Media’s backing, Forum5 was launched in 2008 and has found much success with the new model of talent partnership, quickly growing to represent local talent from the television, music, food and lifestyle industries.

A New Level of Brand Clarity
We worked with Mark to help Forum5 develop absolute clarity around their brand definition and differentiated market proposition. We designed a brand story book and helped form a new language to communicate the new Forum5 offer to market, staff and potential talent partners. Forum5′s brand essence of ‘Partnering to Build Talent Equity’ focused on Marks unique value proposition and formed the starting point for our creative brand expression.

A New Brand Identity
The Forum5 brand mark locks the number 5 within the word ‘Forum’ to illustrate the focus on talent partnerships in a simple and memorable form. The word-mark is simple and graphic allowing it to work across many different applications and to be ‘dialed-up’ or ‘dialed-down’ in prominence depending on the piece of communication and the talent brands it would be appearing with.

The Forum5 business card had to stand-out in an industry where talent is typically bombarded with business cards. Driving from our communication platform of Talent Partnerships we created a book of perforated business cards. The talent receives one half of the card with Forum5s contact details, but the talent’s details are also taken, written on the part of the card that remains with the Forum5 staff member. The ceremony of tearing the card and taking details becomes a brand gesture demonstrating the unique proposition of partnership-based talent relationships. The cards are also individually numbered, and each month a number is drawn and the person who received that card is invited to a lunch with Forum5 founder Mark Richardson.

To assist Forum5 in communicating their brand proposition to the market place, their staff and to Fremantle Media we designed a brand story book. We developed a set of new language and key brand communication messages for each market, enhanced by the book design to spark buy-in and facilitate understanding of the Forum5 brand proposition.

For four decades McAthur has forged an enviable reputation as a multi-specialist National recruitment company focusing on executive, permanent, temporary and consulting solutions for clients. As a 40 year-old business undergoing generational change, the time was right to re-frame the McArthur brand, its go-to-market proposition and its brand image.

McArthur as a business had evolved organically as had its brand visual language. The re-branding program was as much about creating a spirited and contemporary visual language as it was about developing systems to ensure a consistent and organised message unifying state offices and consolidating unified brand communication to the market.

People Power

We created a brand identity system that made McArthur people the heros. This became a wonderful and enriching experience for us and McArthur. The studio got a real insight into the inner workings of McArthur, helping us to understand the McArthur people and what their company means to them. The photo shoot also created a real buzz around the office and it gave the McArthur team an opportunity to be part of the future look of their company. We, collectively not only talked the talk of our brand essence – ‘Best People Fit’, but walked the walked as well.

The hand crafted style of the signature brand mark gave McArthur a unique brand property in the recruitment and service space. McArthur has been family owned for 40 years and the signature style brand mark referenced the hands-on style of the company founder John McArthur. A positive attribute in their market place. The photos and the signature brand mark combined to form the basis of the unique visual language. The signature stands behind the McArthur people reflecting the way McArthur stands behind all of its people.

The benefit to the McArthur business has been tremendous. The McArthur people have engaged with their brand on a level that has built memories and lasting emotional connections.

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.

Rogerseller is a luxury, premium interior product design company. In has been in business for over 100 years and is the leader in beautiful and innovative products for bathrooms and kitchens.

With new competition in the market Rogerseller wished to re-establish a differentiated position for their brand. We were engaged to direct them in the definition of their brand proposition, brand essence and values. Once defined we created this A3-sized brand book to translate the outcomes of the brand work for their staff who are responsible for bringing the Rogerseller brand to life ever day.

The brand book has been designed to reflect the beauty and luxury that is evident through all of Rogerseller’s products. The red thread that weaves its way through the book represents the role of the brand, which also weaves through every aspect of the business from product selection, through the brand’s visual language, to Rogerseller’s high level of client service.