ABOUT

Reinventing a brand needing to better represent its people and growth

I was invited by Oxford Policy Management to pitch for a rebrand. I set out a strategy for this process that sought the opinion of their employees.

A short questionnaire for the wider team was produced to discover how they were interacting with current branded collateral to understand their awareness of the brand. I wanted to establish where the current brand was failing and what was working from a practical basis.

I acted as facilitator for a Brand Workshop that was carried out with members of the Communications Team in FigJam. I set out a series of short brand exercises based on the results of the questionnaire. The workshop was delivered on time and provided great insights for us all.

From these results I created a report which highlighted issues with the brand that needed to be addressed. This was presented along with 3 moodboard themes of design ideas, inspirations and thoughts for the new brand.

These concepts have been developed and a full working brand guidelines have been produced. A key insight we were able to gain from the questionnaire was the lack of knowledge internal staff have of the guidelines and the assets available to them. I am currently working on how to create training documents for staff which will be hosted on OPM’s intranet. This process will save time and resource for OPM.

As a global company dealing with complicated issues, inclusivity is very important to OPM. I helped to set up additional guidance over the use of maps and when to show or not show land borders where there may be conflict.

A strong variety of templates were created to help bring the new branding to a wide audience. These included:
Pull up banners
Posters
Report templates
Word templates
Powerpoint templates
Excel templates
Business cards
Social posts and header templates
Guidance for visual data application
MS Teams background
Internal Strategy Guidance

‘We were aware that we needed to spend some time reflecting on our brand in a holistic way, taking stock of how it had evolved in recent years and where we needed to refresh our brand identity and products to respond to our needs as an organisation. Phil facilitated some really thought-provoking workshop sessions that enabled us to formulate our thinking around our direction of travel including a consideration of our competitor space and creative exploration of styles and design directions. The result was an iteration on our brand identity, including a suite of refreshed products and assets, that allows us to more nimbly respond to the diverse design needs within our organisation, whilst still being authentic to our brand history, consistent with our brand values, purpose, and vision as an organisation.’

Lizzie Shannon-Little
Head of communications and marketing