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5 Reasons why AI is bad at branding

AI’s capabilities have dramatically evolved, enabling machines to perform tasks once thought to be the exclusive domain of humans. Despite these advances, AI struggles with branding due to several intrinsic limitations related to creativity, cultural sensitivity, emotional resonance, and contextual understanding. 1. Lack of Creativity…

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Truly Deeply rebrands Midland trailers

Stunning new brand for iconic Australian trailer manufacturer.

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Aussie Bird Count epitomises brand engagement

Brilliant brand engagement from national conservation charity.

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The importance of simple differentiation

The simplest branding trick. Living in the northern suburbs we see these pink cement trucks lots. My girls love them, shouting out whenever they see them. They always bring a smile to my face and clearly demonstrate the real power of differentiation. It’s let down…

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Michael Hughes provides tips on rebranding for CPA’s ‘INTHEBLACK’

This month’s INTHEBLACK features an article focused on rebranding. “Brand refresh? What you need to know” provides insights for companies when considering a brand refresh. Truly Deeply’s Managing Partner and Strategy Director, Michael Hughes was featured in the August edition of the magazine. Read the…

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A Sneak Peek at our new Branding for Straight Bat PE

  Recently we’ve been developing the branding of Straight Bat – a new breed of P.E. Fund. Straight Bat is a new kind of Private Equity Fund that plays the long game. They invest in “good” businesses, to deliver exceptional income, wealth preservation and wealth…

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Archivio Graphica Italiana – A tribute to Italian Graphic Design.

Today’s post is unashamedly for our brand design obsessed readers. Apologies to those who don’t suffer this affliction, but for those who do – enjoy! Archivio Graphica Italiana is an online archive dedicated to the Italian graphic design heritage. This work of passion covers ‘the…

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Truly Deeply rebrands Central Steel Build

The new brand strategy, architecture and identity helps Australian steel builder reflect their true industry leadership and provides a framework for future business growth. A highly successful business, the rebrand now reflects the true image of the company, one that is continually evolving with its…

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Truly Deeply rebrands Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman

New brand strategy and identity for Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (TIO) created by Melbourne brand agency Truly Deeply. The new brand proposition is all about helping both consumers and providers ‘find a clear way forward’. This is supported by clear and simple messaging that explains what…

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The surprising case for multiple brand mark identities.

The argument for breaking the conventions of brand identity design. One of the strongest principles of branding is less is more. A simple brand proposition with a single clear point of difference expressed consistently through a brand mark and brand identity design have long been…

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When it comes to Branding Popular ≠ Best

When it comes to branding – the approval process is a critical component. I was reading recently about a project to rebrand New York City’s privately owned public spaces (or POPS). The rebrand is being run by The New York City Department of City Planning,…

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Global Brand rankings turned on their head.

The fast changing face of branding. The last eighteen years has seen a seismic shift in global brand rankings. It is almost impossible to believe that less than two decades ago brands such as Apple, Google and Amazon were barely a glint in the world’s…

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The fallout of Nike’s very public product fail.

Ouch! When brands crash to earth. This week Nike suffered a high profile wardrobe failure when the shoe of one of their star college athletes imploded mid-match, sending Zion Williamson tumbling, shortly after followed by the Nike share price. A challenge for all high profile…

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Chain restaurants inspired by independents

Popular UK restaurant chain, Wahaca, has rebranded to appear more like its independent competitors. When I first visited London in 2005, I was shocked to find a chain café or restaurant on almost every corner, and struggled to find a local independent option. Fast forward…

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B2B Brands tap into the Experience Economy with Pop-Up Offices

Long the domain of retail and eComm brands, this new pop-up office from design is giving B2B businesses a entree into the experience economy. Consider a professional services firm (like say… a branding agency) popping-up an office at the beach, opposite the markets, at a…

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Breakfast at Tiffany’s – A brilliant brand collaboration

A Delicious Brand Partnership. A branding strategy that is underutilized yet regularly pays dividends is brand collaborations (especially when it comes to food). When co-branding is envisaged strategically and executed with brand sensitivity, the result can be an extraordinary brand experience – introducing new customers…

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Employee Branding – The Power of Thanks

We wanted to share a great pic from our client Yarra Trams. A part of their annual celebration to show their appreciation, our client had these delicious and beautifully branded cupcakes baked. A feast for the eyes, heart and tummy.  

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Tasty Brand Identities & Delicious Business Card Design

Loving this smart business card design created for Pasta Boy Pete, an Italian cooking instructor in Canada. They say the medium is the message, and in this case the clever crew at Rethink Canada have taken that as their mantra, laser etching the branding and…

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A Passionate & Unapologetic Defense of Brand Marketing for B2B Growth

A strong case for the growth power of B2B brand marketing. Over the summer break I caught up on some reading (the best part of six months worth of recommended articles sitting in my email Inbox). One of those articles was sent to me by…

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2018 – A Year of Truly Brilliant Branding

Where did 2018 Go? We had a great year, working with businesses of all shapes and sizes to create new propositions, launch new products and refresh brands across more than fifty different categories. We captured just some of that activity in this 12 second vid.…

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Click here to enjoy a little Truly Deeply Christmas Cheer

We want to say a big thanks to all our clients, friends and families. It’s been an amazing year! Have a wonderful break and we look forward to seeing you in the new year. Take care, The whole Truly Deeply Crew.

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Pantone have announced the colour for 2019

Yes, Colour of the Year is a thing, and an especially important thing for branding. For 20 years, Pantone’s Color of the Year has influenced product development and purchasing decisions in multiple industries, including fashion, home furnishings, and industrial design, as well as product, packaging,…

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Truly Deeply’s new packaging design for Castlemaine Dips

Delicious New Packaging. Our good friends at Castelmaine Kitchen have created this short clip for their social feed showing the change from old brand to new. If you love your dips, these beauties are worth a try. Your taste buds will thank you for it.

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Adidas inspired by London Underground design

You can now wear the iconic London Tube symbol on your shoes thanks to a new collaboration between Transport for London (TfL) and adidas: adidas x TfL Inspired by the design of the London Underground, there are now limited edition adidas trainers dedicated to each…

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Office updates their suite of icons with a new design mindset

A long overdue brand design update. The last time Microsoft updated the Office icons was in 2013, when selfies were new enough to become Oxford Dictionaries’ Word of the Year. In the half a decade since then the Microsoft product has undergone regular updates as…

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Easy Jet’s Look & Book, a Social Media Masterclass for Brands

The end of Instagram travel envy. The UK’s Easy Jet has launched a new booking app that takes their social media game to a new level. Look & Book is an app designed to turn Instagram travel inspiration into a reality. Look & Book identifies…

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How Colour Psychology Works in Branding

Colour plays an integral part in how we see, respond and feel about almost every aspect of our lives – brands included. “Feeling blue”, “caught red-handed”, “black sheep”, “white lie” – the list goes on. Colour plays such an integral role in the way we…

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Truly Deeply’s Michael Hughes presents on Branding for Millennials at APBN in Seoul

Recently our Director of Brand Strategy, Michael Hughes presented at the APBN conference in Seoul, South Korea. The conference was exploring trends in marketing brands to Millennials and the similarities and differences throughout the Asia Pacific region. Michael was invited to present insights on the…

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Study finds branding drives increase in business value (Spoiler)

Branding‘s big pay-off. We often hear the sentiment that branding is a ‘soft’ business investment. It’s considered a ‘nice to have’ and ‘hard to measure its value’. Having spent the last 28 years working with clients to build their brands, our experience over hundreds of…

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Why engaging your harshest critics makes good brand sense.

Brands that see criticism as all bad are missing the message. For brand owners and managers it can be tough to receive critical feedback. However, behind the criticism is often an opportunity to transform a critic into a powerful advocate. As tempting as it is…

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Susan McKinnon Foundation Branding by Truly Deeply

A Bold & Courageous Brand Identity One of my favorite branding projects of 2018 is this strategy and identity for the Susan McKinnon Foundation. Susan McKinnon Foundation is a non-partisan, not for profit organisation committed to working with all sides of politics to find common…

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The Future of eCommerce – An Infographic

The Future of Retail will continue to be impacted by eCommerce. New technologies and innovations are continuously changing and exponentially improving the user experience and safety which, which will drive continuous eCommerce growth. When we compare what brands were doing online just five years ago…

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Apple demonstrates the power of an iconic brand identity

Don’t try this with your branding at home Apple recently announced their upcoming event where the company is expected to announce their latest product developments. Stepping outside their standard invitation design for the event, Apple created 370 customised versions of their iconic brand symbol. For…

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Carnaby Street Rhapsody

  Although it’s still only October, Carnaby Street, located in the heart of London, has already unveiled its 2018 festive light display, with another amazing and creative design. It is always exciting to see what fashionable Carnaby Street will do. The theme tends to be …

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Selling your business? Why you should rebrand first.

Two tough truths about selling your business. So you’ve spent years (often decades) building a business with your blood, sweat and tears and it’s finally time to sell and collect the reward for all your hard work, ingenuity and perseverance. There’s only two problems with…

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People Don’t Buy Products, They Buy Better Versions of Themselves

Today’s post is a thought piece written by Zander Nethercutt, a really interesting brand thinker from Chicago Il. with a brilliant grasp on how brands work and the role they’ve come to play in our lives. What Apple, Samsung and Starbucks learned from Pepsi The…

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Why an ad agency isn’t the right agency for your rebrand

When it comes to rebranding, all agencies aren’t equal. After more than 25 years of running a branding agency, it’s not every day a conversation with a client re-frames my perspective on our business. But recently, that happened. I was talking to the founder of…

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Brand Story and Identity key to the London Bridge Placemaking

  Having recently returned from living and working in London for 3 years I’ve been keeping up to date with the happenings, particularly in one of my favourite areas, around London Bridge. Working almost next to The Shard, I was able to spend many lunch…

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Brand fails – 5 tips for managing brand mishaps.

Even the big boys can have a bad day… Recently a pic of a livery mistake on a Cathay Pacific jet went viral on social media – well viral in the world of plane and brand watchers at least. Somehow, someone in the chain from…

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Retail Brand Hack; Rethinking the butcher store with vending machines

Applestone Meat Co. turns old tech into a new convenience brand proposition. Applestone Meat Co. is a butcher brand with two outlets in NYC. They are butchers who use their philosophy as a brand differentiator. As they say on their web site: The meat industry…

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Brilliant Brandertainment from John Lewis & Partners + Waitrose & Partners

Wonderful Brand Story-telling. The UK retail landscape has recently welcomed a notable rebranding with launch of the new John Lewis & partners and Waitrose & Partners. Complex architecture and relationship between the two brands aside, the brand design work and typography are stunningly elegant in…

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Good brand advice is not expensive if you can recognize its value.

The Value of Good Advice. Recently I re-read Confessions of the Pricing Man by Hermann Simon, arguably the best book ever written on the subject of pricing. I’ve always seen the subject of pricing as directly connected to branding. As Simon says: “People have asked…

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The 3 golden brand rules to standing out in a crowded market

The strategic brand thinking at the heart of every successful brand. Over the weekend I was having a conversation for the thousandth time with the owner of a relatively new, fast growth business who I realized was hearing it for the first time. The conversation…

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U.S. Open rebranding confuses Simple with Simplistic

The new brand identity for the U.S. Open fails to impress. Watching the U.S. Open tennis on the weekend I copped an eyeful of the tournament’s re-branding for the first time. Somehow I’d missed the commentary on the rebrand in the lead-up to the event’s…

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Is your brand identity design frustrating your customers and clients?

fix ur **bleep**ing logo. If I had a dollar for every time a business owner or marketing director has told me their clients and customers don’t care how their branding looks over the years, I’d be writing this article from my private island in the…

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Your most powerful brand influencers might be right under your nose

Brand ambassadors hidden in plain sight. Influencers have become the newest weapon in the super competitive battle for brands to stand-out. Finding the right celeb or online tribal leader to espouse the benefits of your product has become the new holy grail for brand marketers…

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The Virgin brand steps sideways into hotels

A brand with extraordinary category extension discipline. Arguably no brand has stretched into new categories like Richard Branson’s Virgin has. Capturing the personality of Branson’s own brand, Virgin has come to represent a brand that challenges the paradigm of the categories it enters, usually looking…

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When Brands Tap Into A Tension And Go Against Conventional Thinking To Help Solve It

Today’s post is an article written by Brandhook, good friends of ours and the sharpest brand research and insights agency around. Apple recently announced the introduction of a new software tool to help wean people off their devices, offering users a ‘digital detox’. There’s a…

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Why this CPA article on branding best practice falls short

A branding article filled with good intent. I was initially thrilled to see an article on the CPA’s blog titled; ‘Why your accounting practice brand is more than a logo’. The CPA is one of our countries most trusted and respected associations, representing an industry…

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The Confounding Trend of Bland Branding

Where has all the brand personality gone? Call me old and grumpy, but there’s an emerging trend in brand identity design that has got my goat – the growing popularity of simple, type only brand marks. As a branding agency that breathes, eats and sleeps…

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Papa John’s – When Brand Personalities Strike Out.

The Founder-Led Branding Dilemma. I recently caught up with the news that global pizza chain Papa John’s is set to remove the image of their founder from company branding. Papa John’s Chairman and founder, John Schnatter made a racist remark during an internal training session…

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A $243 sandwich: the positioning power of ultra premium product

Don Wagyu leverages premium positioning to stand-out in a crowded food market. I recently read about a new fast casual Japanese Sandwich concept from New York called Don Wagyu. The article I read spoke about their hero product, The Ozaki, a wagyu beef sandwich that…

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Is office fit-out the most powerful corporate branding statement?

Recently I spent the day at PWC’s Melbourne Office for a business planning retreat. It was the first time I’m been to visit their new digs and was immediately struck by the first impression provided by their foyer and reception. For a consulting firm with…

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Has Amazon become the world’s most influential brand?

The Amazon Brand Effect It seems when Amazon sneezes, the financial markets of the world catch a cold. Interest in what Amazon announce they are set to do, or what they don’t announce, or even what others speculate they may or may not announce is…

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2018 Craft Beer Branding Trends.

Beer + artisanal craftsmanship + great design. What’s not to love about craft beer? Show me an consumer category dominated by large corporations, and I’ll show you a craft revolution waiting to happen. After decades of the world beer market being owned by the big,…

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Sberbank’s Neighbourhood Campaign – A clever piece of bank branding

 Building a commercial banking brand connected to community value The best brand campaigns are those that connect a product or service with a need (conscious or unconscious) in a way that paints a vivid picture of a mutually beneficial outcome. In the case of this…

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Why the world’s leading ad agency outsourced their rebranding

Leaders stick to their knitting. I recently read with great interest about the rebranding of global ad agency Ogilvy. The agency recently announced a global re-founding. “designed to clarify the company’s purpose, simplify its structure, and unify behind one single brand: Ogilvy.” Born in 1948…

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8 Predictions for the Future of Retail in 2030

A glance into the future of retail. Global Retail real estate business CBRE has produced a forward-looking market research, perspectives and industry insights piece called The Future of Retail 2030, an interesting piece of futurist thinking with some well considered suppositions. The retail industry is…

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Fastbrick Robotics – The power of a truly differentiated value proposition

Australian technology business set to disrupt the global building industry. Yeah, that’s a pretty big claim, but in the case of Australia’s Fastbrick Robotics, it’s more likely a prediction than fanciful mission statement. Fastbrick’s first prototype; the Hadrian X is nearing commercial readiness, with the…

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Truly Deeply rebrands Hyperdome shopping centre to South.Point

New name, strategy and identity for major Canberra shopping centre Working together with key stakeholders, we helped refine and reposition one of Canberra’s main shopping centres. The new brand positioning, name and identity is now helping to re-engage the local trade area and excite tenants…

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