Hello (Brave New) World?-?Launching a new brand [Part?1]

Last year, I joined Rainmaking, a global innovation consultancy, and had the opportunity to lead the company’s branding strategy and website redesign. After an entire year of working on this project, we emerged with a new brand ideal and a fully redesigned website. 

I’m so excited to officially launch this new brand identity and website to match the company’s mission, values, and direction. I learned a lot from this experience and felt lucky to be working with some really talented people.

I decided to take some of the best branding practices and frameworks, and my personal experience — and distilled it down into a repeatable process to create an effective, flexible brand strategy. I hope you find it helpful and inspiring :) 

Part 1: Find Your Brand Heart

• Finding your Big IdeaL

Part 2: Articulate Your Messaging

• Building a common language
• Website redesign

Part 3: Create the brand visual identity

• Typography
• Color Pallete
• Iconography 
• Overall imagery

Part 1: Find Your Brand Heart

Often, we forget that a brand is not only expressed via a communication process but is deeply rooted and built from the inside out. A brand comes from the inner vision, mission of the brand leader, and each of the company employees.

Rainmaking — The Story

Rainmaking was founded in 2007 by a small group of entrepreneurs to build impactful businesses. In the years that followed, they founded Startupbootcamp, one of the world’s most successful accelerators, to help other founders grow.

Their company evolved, but the entrepreneurial spirit remained hardwired into their culture. They approach every business as if it were their own.

Today, Rainmaking is using their entrepreneurial experience, tools, and mindset to help some of the world’s leading companies address big challenges. They are one of the world’s leading corporate innovation and venture development firms with 12 offices situated in global tech hubs such as London, Copenhagen, Dubai, Singapore, New York, and Sydney.

Finding your Big IdeaL

According to Robyn Putter, the leader of Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide Creative Council, most admired brands are built not just on big ideas, but on big ideaLs. Those big ideaLs are much greater than the annual sales targets, they are not driven by a goal, but a philosophy and belief.

As shown in the Venn diagram below, a bid ideaL firstly comes from the "brand's best self" that embodies its core values, people, and target clients. The circle named "Cultural tension" represents a cultural trend/truth that is universally acknowledged, such as social injustice and racial discrimination. A brand ideaL becomes the company’s point of view on the world, or on life, or on the country where it's located.

In order to find the direction of Rainmaking’s brand, we began by holding interviews with internal employees and partners. From this, we selected the most impactful statements which defined the next step for the new branding.

“This is an unpredictable world — even the most conservative industries have discovered that they are not immune from the unexpected.”

“From the start, we understood that if we could partner with corporates, we could have the best of both worlds…. We’d be stronger together.”

“We want to do good in the universe — choosing meaningful projects where we can solve real problems…”

Informed by our heritage and a shared ambition we started working on a conceptual route for the brand. This video is about our purpose and what we do as a company to achieve this purpose.

Part 2: Articulate Your Messaging

Building a common language

With the Brand Essence articulated, we have formed a basis for communicating who we really are at every touchpoint, from articulating the value proposition and the key messaging pillars on the website site to the social media posts.

We run a product portfolio assessment and reviewed the company’s strategy to identify which offerings and industries should be prioritised as part of this update. Referring back to the brand, we made the collateral fit seamlessly with the new brand story ensuring that the product messaging lands well with the audience and the company’s strategy.

This exercise revealed the need to redesign the company’s website and to introduce new pages, a content management system, and a new CRM.

Website Redesign

We started sketching out the basic layout of the website, listing out the sections and pages, and finding out what has to go where. We managed to quickly restructure the navigation, information architecture, and package everything in a modular WordPress — Gutenberg environment.

Considering we are a team of 200+ individuals and content creators, we needed an easy-to-use content hub that will help market their products, case studies, and articles.

• A modular content infrastructure that supports content for multiple pages, across the website and from a single point of content entry to reduce redundancy.
• A flexible, modern infrastructure using Pillar Pages and Cluster Topics that allows for future implementation of content collections and SEO.

Part 3: Create the brand visual identity

We decided to support the new brand narrative with an updated visual identity. We introduced a new visual language with revised color, iconography, and typography systems.

Font

The font should represent the values and tone of voice of the brand. When thinking about brand experience and touchpoints, the font used is integral, as it is most widely seen as an imperative to the visual language. It can become as recognizable as the logo or colour palette itself.

Tip — You also want to pick a font type that is compatible with most editing/presentation tools. Whilst some allow you to install new fonts, others don’t e.g. Google Slides.

After a few iterations, we decided on Helvetica Neue. It’s a great, functional tool, especially as a multi-language family that will help communicate consistently across countries and cultures. It’s a very popular font type, and so not a true differentiator for the company. We focussed instead on a more unique font sizing system. See it live on www.rainmaking.io

Color Pallete

Rainmaking brand always had a simple, monochrome look. From a visual standpoint, we wanted to maintain a clean website and to add a more powerful, and engaging colour palette.

We created a mood board for each color palette to give consistency to the recommendation. This demonstrates how the colors are combined together.

Iconography

Icons are a crucial part of any design system or product experience. Icons help us navigate quickly, and are very helpful for marketing materials.

For this project, we didn’t symbolise that many elements, we preferred to keep the design clean and create several modular contents which could be easily re-used across the website. 

The brand needed to work around the world. Its highest growth areas are in regions outside of Europe, such as the USA, MENA, and Singapore, where Rainmaking has a considerable depth of experience. Instead of pursuing a complex identity system, localized through colours and patterns, we moved towards a universal ‘beyond-simple’ global brand. Teams in diverse markets can make it relevant to their audiences with culturally specific content.

We decided instead to introduce product-specific imagery and to create a brand identity around each of the company’s key services.

This new identity system brings order to the family of products and helps towards creating more memorable and differentiated value propositions, messages, and stories.

Overall Imagery

The application system has a fantastic simplicity that is both globally functional and visually striking. When you think about the expense of people that will deploy this identity across countries, maintaining this level of simplicity is necessary. 

The pastel color grid, combined with a unique font sizing system and a modern, less conventional image grid layouts happen to look bold, with the potential to become recognizable as a corporate identity system. 

Closing words

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the last few years of working in branding and marketing, it’s that a successful business can’t survive if it doesn’t have a strong brand strategy. Without a unified identity, everything from your content, to your culture, to your core business can suffer.

Despite the ever-changing landscape of digital marketing and communication channels, countless brands still thrive due to effective branding. Why? Because they own a brand story that is relevant and appealing to the customers.

In a former article on How Marketing Will Change in 2020, I quoted Jeff Rosenblum saying:

“Successful brands empower, not interrupt […] Some of the most powerful brands create experiences that help the audience understand what the brand truly stands for and how it can impact their lives.”

This couldn’t be more relevant to the times of uncertainty we live in.

Now, more than ever, we need brands to become leaders. To build with a true and lasting purpose. To tell stories that bring us together and create movements toward a better future.

In an upcoming article, I will share how we successfully launched (and still rolling) this brand and marketing campaign in the wake of COVID-19 using an integrated marketing plan including:

• thought leadership content informed by extensive research of 300+ enterprise senior business leaders
• turning around what was supposed to be a physical panel discussion and PR conference onto a fully virtual event with 200+ business leaders
• creative media-sell to ensure the depth of message via targeted media placements
• B2B LinkedIn campaign to continue to reinforce the messages by meeting our audience across all key channels.

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Special thanks to my team at Rainmaking, BB Agency for their creative work, and Alfred PR for leading our media efforts.