2024 has been a tricky year on many levels, with budgets scrutinised and brands having to work hard, with less. There are many pragmatic ways to support your existing brand and communications, including developing assets to make a real difference, using campaigns to refresh your brand’s look and feel, and harnessing AI as a helpful tool.
Every year we talk about how challenging it is. There’s so much global uncertainty in terms of climate change, wars and recent changes in governments. And in branding, there are more challenges than ever. Technology is speeding up. Channels are proliferating and becoming more sophisticated. AI is here to stay. We’re still grappling with the challenges of hybrid working. Leadership teams seem cautious or indecisive. And on top of all that, budgets are being cut and we’re having to do more with less.
Developing your brand has historically been a big one-off project that only happens every few years and in challenging times, it’s harder than ever to commit to this level of change.
Gartners annual CMO spend survey shows that marketing budgets are shrinking year on year, confirming what everyone’s collectively feeling.
We can no longer operate the way we always did as we try to do more with less. It’s time to rethink the challenges and look at them from a different perspective. When it comes to branding, it’s time to experiment, trial new things, test and learn. We can no longer rely on what we’ve always done and need to do things differently.
Doing a brand audit is a good way to work out what’s working with a brand, what could be better and what’s missing. Tangible actions can be identified that can be woven in without changing everything. They’re also a useful tool to allow conversations with senior stakeholders as they are evidence based.
Brand audits can work at different levels. They typically involve looking at your visual and verbal brand and your competitors, which could include aspirational competitors and peers.
They can help to identify short term priorities that can be built into an existing brand. For example, tightening up your messaging, creating a set of templates to improve consistency, or commissioning a photoshoot to give your imagery a new lease of life.
We’ve been auditing brands for many years and it’s really noticeable how quickly things change. Organisations are constantly refreshing, updating or merging. It’s important that you don’t stand still in these challenging times, as your competitors won’t be.
We’ve just launched an audit product, that can give an initial insight to your brand in a workshop environment.
It’s more important than ever to keep your brand agile and buoyant, the digital era has meant we are producing communications quicker than ever before, and delivering messages through social media on a weekly, if not daily basis.
If you don’t have a brand that can flex enough, you will quickly run out of ideas. The concept of a brand that is continually flexing can seem quite daunting, but it needn’t be.
It doesn’t have to mean starting from scratch with a rebrand, it can mean adding ‘another visual place to go’ to your existing brand toolkit. By adding a hand drawn element to Hopestead we were able to add a new level of sophistication to the brand and for Baringa we created a more human use of their existing collage style for the Economics of Kindness campaign.
It’s starting to feel like a cliché when we talk about ‘keeping it real’ or making it ‘authentic’, but in a world that is becoming more fake by the day, ‘keeping it real’ seems to be more important than ever.
Showcasing who you are is your differentiator. No one else will have your people, culture, or way of working. You are unique, and your verbal and visual brand can help truly reflect all that makes you, you.
For Rokos Capital Management we put their people at the heart of the recruitment campaign using reportage photography that told the unique story of life at Rokos. For Freshfields global law firm we interviewed and filmed their trainees, used the footage in reels on Instagram and used verbatim quotes throughout the campaign to authentically reflect life on the graduate programme.
Where imagery is concerned AI is becoming a useful tool, and our clients are grappling with whether to use it or not and defining policies around it.
Authenticity and trust are key. Getty has published a report on Building trust in the age of AI, that digs into the subject of authenticity finding that it is really important, especially, and not surprisingly, when dealing with images of people.
There are degrees of difference to how AI is used and how visible it is. Photoshop now uses AI, including in a generative fill tool that can expand backgrounds, an easy way to adapt an image for different formats. And we’ve starting using AI as a stepping stone in the creative process. In a recent logo development project we created AI generated shapes, not to use as they are, but to give us some interesting reference.
For some clients we are starting to use AI generated imagery more overtly. It allows us to realise ideas that would not have been possible otherwise and perhaps have an obvious touch of fantasy about them if that’s appropriate.
It’s worth remembering that AI doesn’t come up with creative ideas, people do. It’s a useful tool and is good for shortcutting processes but is derivative so won’t replace the human take on creativity and original thought.
We often hear ‘how do I keep my marketing/creative team inspired?’ Without an inspired team, we can begin to see the same ideas unfold. There are many ways we help ourselves to get inspired at Frank, Bright & Abel:
If you want to keep your brand moving forward it doesn’t have to mean starting from scratch, it can mean adding new places and spaces to go. Whether that’s starting at the very beginning with a brand audit or adding in a simple brand asset to change how your tool kit is used. As long as you keep moving forward you will remain relevant and interesting to both your external and internal audiences.
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Our digital and social storytelling campaign helped showcase the human face of the firm.
With the ever-increasing importance of employer brand, aligning it closely to your core brand is more critical than ever.
Whether you want us to be frank, bright, able or all three, get in touch.
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