How Brand Architects deliver a better version of your brand

Over the past 10 years I've led teams that have created six brands from scratch and I've delivered brand refresh projects for several more, including:-

Pinnacle (formerly Pinnacle Sports)

Heart of Vegas - the hugely successful social casino by product madness, now owned by Aristocrat

Foxy Bingo - at the time owned by bwin.party

Jackpot Party - the UK online casino owned by WMS

For the majority of these I was the key stakeholder and I've been honing my own methodology for refreshing brands over each project in turn.

In simple terms, and depending on your budget it works like this:-

1/ Research Phase - you ask your customers and internal stakeholders a number of questions relating to their perception of your brand

2/ Discovery Phase - I would explore this information and start to define a series of Workshop agendas. Ideally these Workshops are held with a maximum 15 people in the same room (although I have done a couple with more than 5 offices dialing in by video conference).

3/ Draft Phase - Stage 1 Architecture is defined, specifically brand mission, positioning, personality and tone of voice. These are then fed into another Workshop session to hone down towards a set of guidelines that are not only accepted, but largely loved by the majority.

4/ Detail Phase - Logo, font, typography and copy guidelines are defined - either with your in house design team or an external agency. If needs be I have a number of design professionals that I know and trust from lengthy experience.

5/ Polishing Phase - we debate and chip away at the final draft before putting your new, refreshed brand guidelines into a Brand Architecture Book, or 'Brand Bible' as it's sometimes known.

The book, on hard or soft form can then be shared amongst all internal and external stakeholders, shareholders and agencies to better explain What your brand really means, what it;'s trying to say and how it's saying it.

And all this won't cost you the £200k + I've heard quoted numerous times over the years. Maybe not even 10% of that, depending on the level of detail we need to go into.

So if this sounds like something you want, perhaps even have to do, then please get in touch.