PSR Strategy and Rebrand

PSR

Work

PSR

Branding the world’s first and only payment systems regulator.
Blueleaf Brand identity

Blueleaf

Work

Blueleaf

A stripped-back, spacious brand expression for an all-encompassing customer offer.
Where Do You Draw The Line

UCLH

Work

UCLH

Encouraging a kinder workplace culture at University College London Hospitals.
NEST Social Media content

NEST

Work

NEST

A smart, multi-channel brand engagement campaign to educate and engage.
Recent thoughts
Why strategy always comes first

Why strategy always comes first

Creativity and creative ideas don’t spring from nowhere. They need fertile soil to take root in. For us, that means research, insight, and strategy.

Strategy is always the first step in our creative process. When we start work on a brand, whether for an organisation or a campaign, we start with three questions. Who’s the audience? What does it need to communicate? And what is the context – what other brands and messages are competing for the same audience’s attention?

Those three questions guide our research, revealing insights that help us form the idea at the heart of the brand.

There’s a notion that leading with strategy makes the creative work less … creative. That the strategy constrains the creativity, turning something that should be inspired and expressive into something more like painting by numbers.

But ask anyone involved in a creative pursuit and they’ll tell you that constraints and parameters are vital for creativity. There’s nothing less inspiring than a blank canvas.

There’s nothing less inspiring than a blank canvas

Brand strategy research

And while our work is creative, inspiring and expressive, it’s also a commercial service. We commit to delivering it within a certain timeframe to help our clients achieve their goals. Starting with strategy gets us focused as early as possible on what we need to do creatively to achieve those goals.

It means we don’t waste our clients’ time waiting and hoping the muse will inspire us. It gives us a better chance of presenting something that’s right first time. And it streamlines decision-making.

Decisions about creative work can all too easily become about individual reviewers’ personal taste, which can lead to deadlock, followed by dilution of the work to try to please everyone. But when there’s a clear strategy behind the work, the discussion can focus on whether it could deliver on that strategy more powerfully, rather than on the associations it sparks in individual people.

We’re a creative bunch, and we’ve found that this way of working makes the best use of our creativity. Research and insight show us what matters; and instead of spreading ourselves thin, trying to fill an entire blank canvas, we can focus the full force of our creativity on those key elements.

Cousins, not clones

Cousins, not clones

A successful brand gives people a cohesive experience no matter which channels and touch points they use to engage with it. But that doesn’t mean the experience has to be totally uniform. There’s plenty of space to be flexible, even playful, while still maintaining cohesion.

Here’s an example: while researching issue 2 of the Brand Report, we looked at two different campaigns by the investment brand Moneyfarm. The Invest Wisely campaign uses brightly coloured backgrounds, cut-out photographic images of objects, and snappy, commanding headlines. The No More If Onlys campaign uses darker, heavier colours, photographic backgrounds, and longer headlines based on historical quotes.

The two campaigns look quite different. But Moneyfarm’s brand is no less cohesive for that.

Of course, the Moneyfarm logo appears in both campaigns, labelling them both as part of the brand. A brand is much more than just a logo, but the logo is a powerful, unmistakable sign that a given communication belongs to that brand.

And crucially, the two campaigns feel similar. Behind the distinct messages and expressions, there’s evidence of a consistent personality influencing the style of the campaigns. No More If Onlys presents predictions that haven’t aged well; Invest Wisely presents homely objects that represent time well spent; both campaigns trust their audiences to get the point without a lot of explanation, and both have a sense of playfulness and humour that helps the messages to land. The two campaigns are like cousins: they’re individual, but you can see the family resemblance.

The two campaigns are like cousins: individual, but you can see the family resemblance

Moneyfarm campaign visual
Moneyfarm campaign visual

Read between the guidelines

There’s a negative stereotype of a brand manager as someone who says no to creativity, who uses the brand as a constraint to stifle exciting ideas. But there’s a good reason the industry standard term is brand guidelines, not brand rules. Good brand guidelines simply describe ways to use colour, type, tone of voice, and specific graphic devices like the logo to signal to audiences that different communications belong to the same family. Skilled creatives can find endless fresh and exciting ways to incorporate those signals.

And it’s important to encourage this kind of creative exploration. Without it, you risk losing your audience’s attention. If each new campaign or publication seems cloned from the one before, your audiences will stop noticing them, thinking they’ve seen and engaged with them already. Regularly pushing your brand into new territory keeps engaged audiences from switching off, and provides regular opportunities to engage new audiences.

This article is from issue 2 of the Brand Report. For more insights and action points to strengthen your brand, download the complete report now.

Does insight want to be free?

Does insight want to be free?

Insight and expertise are the foundations of many brands. It’s important to convince potential customers you have them – and that means giving some away for free.

Some brands do this with a blog on their website. Others go the extra mile and create a publication, with its own brand, to house their insight content.

Some of these publications exist in print; some are published as PDFs; some as online content. Whatever form they take, creating and maintaining a publication brand takes effort. So what are the pros and cons, and when is it worthwhile to spin off your content offering into its own brand?

A separately branded publication lets you target new and different audiences

When is it worthwhile to spin off your content offering into its own brand?

The pitfalls

The big potential downside of a publication brand separate from your main brand is that it can separate your insights from your organisation itself. The point of publishing insight is to influence potential customers’ perceptions of your brand. If there’s a chance that someone who discovers and values your publication might not connect it back to its parent brand, that’s a problem.

Likewise, if insight is part of your brand promise, but potential customers who see that promise can’t find the insights you’re publishing to back it up, that’s also a problem.

So if you do choose to create a separate publication brand, it needs to be clearly related to your main brand, and the customer journey between the two brands needs to be straightforward. But why create a separate publication brand at all?

Distance and flexibility

A separate brand signals that your publication has a level of editorial freedom from your corporate brand. It suggests to the audience that the publication is not a pure sales and marketing channel in the same way as a corporate blog. If the publication has its own distinct name and look, it’s easier for audiences to accept that it exists mainly to provide them with valuable insights, not to sing the praises of a particular product.

That same editorial freedom gives you new flexibility. Maybe there are messages, insights or opinions that it’s difficult to express within the framework of your corporate brand. A publication with a bit of distance from that brand could be the way to put those messages across.

That flexibility potentially gives you more reach, and that’s the real benefit of a separately branded publication. It lets you target new and different audiences.

If your brand is struggling to appeal to younger people, for instance, a publication designed to appeal to that generation could be a strategy for engaging with them more effectively without changing your entire corporate brand.

And it’s possible that people who would never engage with your corporate brand directly – because they don’t need the services you offer, or because their values clash with yours in some way – could still find value in the content you publish. Perhaps they’ll never become customers, but they could still help you by endorsing and sharing your insights with other people who will. They’re unlikely to do that with your corporate blog, but an expert publication, related to your brand but clearly separated from it, could be another story.

Any of these approaches can work as long as it’s backed up by a strong content strategy. But if you’ve dismissed the idea of forming a publication brand in the past, it’s worth looking again at the value it could provide.

This article is from issue 2 of the Brand Report. For more insights and action points to strengthen your brand, download the complete report now.

3 tone of voice traps brands need to avoid

3 tone of voice traps brands need to avoid

Your brand’s tone of voice is as important to get right as the logo or look and feel – so you need to be able to spot when it’s going wrong.

Like the other elements that make up your brand, your tone of voice needs to be distinct and recognisable, and consistent throughout your audience’s interactions with your brand.

Every brand’s tone of voice is different. And it should be flexible; it would be weird if a product launch video and a customer bill struck exactly the same tone. So what’s ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ when it comes to tone of voice depends heavily on the brand and the situation.

But there are also some common pitfalls that all brands should always try to avoid…

It would be weird if a product launch video and a customer bill struck exactly the same tone

1. Blame-proof grammar

The passive voice is when you say “The door was opened”, instead of the active “Alex opened the door”. It’s a bit of grammar that can easily be abused to avoid taking responsibility for something.

You often see it in apologies for corporate misbehaviour (“Mistakes were made…”) and communications that demand something of the audience (“Members are requested…”). It reads strongly as an attempt to downplay the brand’s involvement in the events and weasel out of any blame or consequences. Not an impression you want your audience to have of your brand.

Don’t listen to anyone who tells you the passive voice is always wrong. There are absolutely cases where it’s the best tool for the job. But it makes a flimsy shield. In both apologies and requests, a direct approach is more effective.

2. Jargon and made-up words

Making up words is an easy way to make your products and services sound unique (and easier to google). But a made-up word is a hurdle in your audience’s path; you have to explain it before anyone can fully understand what you’re offering. That’s extra work for you and for your audience. Ask yourself if you could use a word they already understand instead, and get to the point more quickly.

Using jargon – words and phrases with specific meanings in your organisation or industry – is an even easier trap to fall into. When you use it every day, you can forget your audience might not – and substituting simpler terms can feel like dumbing things down.

But research shows that even the most sophisticated readers actually prefer simpler, plainer language. Don’t make things hard for your audience by making them translate your content. They’ll reward you by engaging more readily.

3. Style over substance

Yes, your brand’s tone of voice should be distinct and recognisable … but it’s possible to take distinctiveness too far.

Can you think of a brand you find irritating? That’s a sign that its voice is taking priority over its message. You can tell it’s working hard to get your attention, but what it’s actually trying to tell you is obscured by overly stylised language. Sometimes it’s matey familiarity, sometimes shocking impact, sometimes smarmy superiority.

Brands can be familiar, impactful or sophisticated, of course. The issue is that when the message takes a back seat to the personality, the audience can’t help but get frustrated.

More brands fall into these pitfalls than you might think – so learn to spot them, and you’ll be well on the way to developing a tone of voice your audience will want to engage with.

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