A brand is more than a logo

It's finished when everyone in the business writes and creates in the same voice

The logo gets approved, the new decks are made, the first social posts go out and the website is live. Everyone is pleased and the project is marked done. That is roughly where the real work starts.

The test is every place the brand ends up that nobody planned for. A hoarding. A jacket. The side of a van. The words spoken on a client call. If those look or sound like different companies, the brand isn't finished, whatever the guidelines say.

What it looks like when it holds

Cobb Amos is an estate agent. The name goes on the shopfront, the door, the stationery and the sold board. The sold board is the one that matters most, because people see it before they see the shop. It has to look like the same company as everything else, from the other side of the street.

Handy AV is audio visual. The identity runs from the brochure to the website to the jacket worn in the warehouse. The jacket was not on anyone's list at the start. It is where the people who work there are seen every day.

Estama manages property. Their brochure and website have a short, no-nonsense phrase that says something about how they work: keep it simple, mind the gap, cut the red tape. You hear it on the client call. The brand is in the way they write and speak as much as in the way it looks.

Rallio is a racket sports app. The brand starts from the court, so the app and everything around it has something to build on.

The harder part

The identity is the smallest part of the job. The harder part is deciding what the company is going to say, and then saying it everywhere, including the places nobody thought to ask about.

A check you can do this week

Make a list of every place your name appears. Start with the priorities, then add the ones people see by accident: the van, the invoice, the email signature, the sign on the door, the badge on the jacket.

Then put the results side by side and ask whether they sound like one company.

We help with that, from the idea through to planning the roll-out. Every step, and in the places you may not have looked at for a while.