Coaching Impact is an award-winning Performance Coaching company that coaches leaders, teams and organisations so they achieve more, learn faster and live better.
Founder Sara Milne Rowe originally came to InnerVisions ID in need of a new brochure. However, when we looked at the rest of their collateral, it was apparent there was another, larger issue which needed to be addressed.
The company had been going for over 10 years and, as it had grown, brought on more and more team members who were all producing more and more brand assets; brochures, training aids, PowerPoint documents and workbooks.
The brand that had started out with only vague guidelines, over time, was now growing unkempt and spiralling in many different directions. Over time, with everyone giving their own personal spins, tweaks and additions to the brand guidelines the branding was starting to lose its way.
Before we could decide how to take the brand forward, we needed to conduct a Brand Assessment.
Brand Assessment
We asked the team to send us all their marketing collateral.
Now any company which has been going as successfully as Coaching Impact for any length of time will be doing something right. But as with your business strategy, your brand strategy and branding should be assessed continually to make sure it is representing your brand and serving it well for now, and the future.
If your organisation changes, evolves or grows – your branding might not represent how it wants to be in the future.
Despite some early brand guidelines, Coaching Impact’s branding had started to develop in several differing directions, each with different styles and colours – as you can see below (a small sample of everything we got sent)
Coaching Impact had clearly built a level of brand recognition and equity – and didn’t want to lose that. But the brand needed a refresh to look ready for its next phase of growth.
Global brands like Coca Cola, McDonalds, Ford and Apple do this all the time; tiny tweaks to keep the look updated and relevant for the market. You should be reassessing your branding at least every 3-5 years and, if something has changed about your business, think about whether your brand is communicating that.
We call this process ‘evolution not revolution’.
We create our Brand Assessments with a traffic light system:
Green: This part of your branding is great. Let’s keep it going!
Amber: These bits are OK, but could do with a tweak/improvement
Red: These bits are not serving your brand – stop doing this.
This document takes the fear out of change for our clients as it provides them with a clear ‘road map’. We discuss it with all the brand stakeholders and then agree actions, priorities and timelines for the elements they wish to go ahead with.
Here are some example pointers from the extensive Brand Assessment.
Green (examples):
- Overall, the look and feel was recognisably Coaching Impact so we didn’t want to lose that.
- They had brand guidelines with typefaces, colour and imagery all defined
- Sara loved and wanted to keep the ‘Boom’ head illustration.
Amber (examples):
- The logo was quite clever and they didn’t want a redesign, but it lacked real ‘impact’.
- The colour palette was OK in the main, but the ‘mucky cream’ was causing problems, reproducing inconsistently and making PowerPoint printouts look grubby.
- There were three different styles of illustration – cartoon, hand-drawn simple and the highly stylised ‘Boom’ illustration.
- The ‘mirror’ image didn’t read as a mirror – more like a porthole, a window or even the moon.
- The brochures did not follow a consistent format, nor did the placement of the type with the ‘mirror’
- Infographics had a mixture of type styles, illustration styles (some icons, some illustrations) and colours. These needed to be more consistent.
Red (examples):
- The newspaper cartoon style of illustration took the brand in a contradictory direction that was much less business-focused and needed to go
- Use of cartoony Comic Sans (on the water bottle) had to stop. It wasn’t in the brand guidelines – and there is never an excuse for Comic Sans!
EVOLUTION NOT REVOLUTION
We prioritised the brochures and the illustrations, but I still thought that logo needed a tweak, so I asked Sara to humour me on that one…
Before
After
Just putting the same logo in the solid blue modernised it and instantly gave it more impact.
We replaced the old mirror with a new one with a silver frame. This now reads clearly as a mirror, rather than as a moon, window or porthole.
Left: Before. Right: After
Sara loved her ‘BOOM’ illustration (left) so we decided to develop all the images towards that style. We commissioned an illustrator to redraw this middle head in the more modern style (right).
Left: BOOM head. Middle: original sketch head, redrawn and restyled, right.
Then we redrew the old ‘tabloidy’ cartoon illustrations…
Cartoons before
…to match the BOOM style, using the Coaching Impact brand colours…although we ditched that problematic cream background!
Cartoons after
We continued extending the new, improved scheme with their brochures, PowerPoint documents, workbooks, postcards, bookmarks and updated brand guidelines.
We also delivered a training module to the team to help everyone who creates materials internally to stay more ‘on-brand’. This is part of our ‘Nurture’ service which helps you roll out your rebrand smoothly.
After
THE RESULT
Sara and her team loved the transformation. Everything now looks fresher, far more cohesive, modern, pulled together.
”The Brand Assessment demonstrated that my company branding needed more consistency and a refresh – and gave us a clear roadmap to do it with.
Sapna and her team went above and beyond. They delivered everything to testing deadlines and we felt in safe hands throughout the process.
They aligned all our assets so they were clear, meaningful, dynamic and finally ‘on brand’. Highly recommend.
Sara Milne Rowe, Coaching Impact
If your company is going through change and your brand needs to evolve with it, we can help. Book a no-obligation 30-minute call here.
