Your brand is a core asset of your company. In fact, it’s the foundational asset of your company.
If you’ve worked on it, then you’ve created a valuable asset. If you’ve neglected your brand, then it’s probably doing more harm than you think.
But, what is in a brand?
One of the most common mistakes companies make is to conflate their logo with their brand. After all, the top function of a logo is fast recognition: if people recognize your logo, they know your brand, right?
Wrong.
Recognition is important, but it’s not all there is to it. You can recognize your grandfather/grandmother and your husband/wife equally fast, but you feel very differently about them.
Read on to discover what “brand” really means, and the value of giving it room to grow.
A Brand Is a Promise
Brand really comes down to how your clients and the public experience your company—and it’s also a promise.
A brand is a promise of quality, consistency, and future experiences.
In the best of cases, the highest quality, unwavering consistency, and fulfilling future experiences.
Your brand is also a promise to your clients about your values, your innovation, and identity. It can evoke intangible qualities such as affection and joy. When done wrong, it can lead to disappointment.
To quote the inimitable Marty Neumeier: “A brand isn’t what you say it is. A brand is what they say it is.”
Embedded in this statement is the reciprocal nature of the relationship. Customers experience your brand through the choices you make about design, marketing, products, services, communication, and support.
Once you make a promise with your brand, people will hold you to that promise.
Your Brand Always Has Room to Grow
Your brand isn’t static, like a list of values you frame on the wall. It’s directly correlated with how people, how each person, experiences it.
Every customer and prospective customer interaction is a chance to uphold the promise.
As your company grows, you have the chance to expand the brand promise. And as the market changes, so should your brand.
This is where values and identity matter most.
If you don’t solidify your brand identity, you’ll be pushed around by forces outside your control. On the other hand, if your brand is too rigidly defined, you’ll miss opportunities in the marketplace.
For example, in the late 90s and early 00s Kodak saw itself as a photographic film company, not a company that helped people take great pictures. They missed their chance to lead the digital camera market, and eventually filed for bankruptcy in 2012.
Focus is vital to growing a successful brand, but so is self-awareness and the flexibility to embrace change. Your dialogue with your community of customers and network of potential customers should inform the development of your brand over time.
In essence, to develop a great brand, you must work with these two contrasting ideas.
On one hand, your brand needs an identity based on firm values and a clear mission. On the other, your brand must be flexible and conscious enough to grow over time.
Your Brand Can Unlock Hidden Potential
Once you’ve established what your brand represents and how you want the public to experience it, a new phase of work begins: delivering on that brand promise and exploring opportunities to expand it.
Crucial to this new phase is the ability to maintain authenticity and stay true to the brand you aspire to be known as while also catering to the needs of your audience and the market. In other words, don’t lose sight of why you exist in the first place.
We coach our financial services and fintech customers through this five-step process when assessing their brands:
- Look for hidden strengths within the brand: Identify unique qualities and capabilities that differentiate your brand.
- Realign with the market: Ensure your brand remains relevant by understanding and responding to market trends and customer needs.
- Recenter on the customer: Place the customer at the center of your brand strategy, ensuring their needs and experiences drive your initiatives.
- Stay authentic: Remain true to your brand’s core values and mission, ensuring that market adaptations do not compromise your identity.
- Lay out a plan to update the brand based on these findings: Develop a strategic plan that incorporates these insights to refresh and strengthen your brand.
And after ten years in business, we decided in 2023 that it was time for CSTMR to engage in this deep branding work—on CSTMR.
Because if we’re unwilling to evaluate and redefine our brand, what business do we have helping anyone else do the same?
We’ve built a lot of trust with our clients. Our brand felt comfortable, but we also felt like we’d outgrown it. It was time to take some new measurements and tailor a look that matched the internal and external perception of CSTMR as an agency.
This ultimately sparked the acquisition of Vie Design Co., a UK-based branding firm, the appointment of Daniel Ocock to Chief of Brand, and new look and feel for CSTMR.
For us, rebranding is a source of discovery and joy, connecting with the best version of a company and expressing it in a way that everyone can see.
It’s also scary.
We empathize with clients who feel like rebranding puts their value-driven identity at risk. In most cases, buy-in is rather easy to come by when a fintech company comes to us with a brand that totally misses the mark.
But what if it gets you 50% of the way there? You’ve worked hard to build the brand you have—why change something that’s working, even if it leaves a lot to be desired?
Easy: because it can work even better.
CSTMR: Expanded Mission, New Look
Our willingness to expand the CSTMR promise is baked into who we are at the deepest level.
While we loved the solidity of our logotype (i.e., “CSTMR”), we also knew it was time to develop a simpler, more iconic logo that could command attention in an image-driven culture.
The intersecting hexagons represent the twin platforms of our expertise: financial brands and marketing, and financial customers.
From a practical perspective, hexagons offer incredible stability and modularity.
Metaphorically speaking, they represent the stability of our marketing discipline combined with the limitless flexibility of our creative thinking.
In other words, hexagons are an interplay of robustness and creativity.
These are the same principles that our financial services and fintech customers need to succeed. They adhere to strict regulatory/industry guidelines, and without fresh ideas, their businesses won’t survive.
A new logo, fresh colors, and comprehensive design language helped us bring the truth of our brand to life. We use them to inject renewed energy into every communication and audience touchpoint.
The message we always want to send is this: CSTMR is the digital marketing agency that transforms fintech and finance businesses into brands that change lives.
Everything about our new brand look and feel supports this promise.
Let’s Take Your Brand Forward, Together
We recently presented a client’s refreshed brand to their team of 70–80 employees.
The energy in the room felt electric. Everyone resonated with the company’s promise, look, and feel. Afterward, they told us about the new, communal sense of pride in what they were building together.
It’s been a game-changer for that client—already a market leader, their new brand put them far ahead of the competition.
We’ve seen reinvigoration like that over and over with our clients.
The new CSTMR brand helps us tap into that same energy and broadcast our promise to the world.
As we wrap up our first decade in business and look to future decades, the CSTMR rebrand represents the next evolution of who we are and the value we create for our clients: the best of where we’ve been and the best of what’s next.
We invite you to take that journey with us!
—If your company would like to explore rebranding with CSTMR, we’d love to talk!
