In this episode
In this episode of the Mighty Finsights Podcast, Rory and Dan explore the intricate relationship between brand identity and the visualization of brand values, particularly through the use of color. They discuss how colors evoke emotions and how they can be strategically chosen to resonate with target audiences. The conversation includes case studies of three brands: Access One, Nexi, and Onyx IQ, highlighting their unique branding journeys and the importance of aligning visual elements with core values. The discussion emphasizes the evolving nature of brands and the necessity for businesses to adapt their branding strategies over time.
Key takeaways
- Brand identity is akin to bringing a character to life.
- Choosing the right color palette is crucial for brand resonance.
- The process of branding involves deep understanding and strategy.
- Brands evolve over time, requiring periodic reassessment.
- Honesty and authenticity are key in brand storytelling.
Transcript
Rory Holland (00:09)
Hey, my name is Rory. I’m the founder and CEO at customer.
Dan (00:14.178)
My name is Dan, I’m the brand identity and strategist here at customer.
Rory Holland (00:19.66)
Well, Dan, bringing it back around, we, on the last podcast, we talked about basically bringing personality to brand and what does that mean? So really giving it a soul is what we talked about and that personality and style. And what I’m excited about today is we’re going to be talking about how do we take the values of a brand and really make them resonate throughout the brand and a variety of other elements of the brand. Excited to kind of hear what you think about that.
Dan (00:55.342)
Absolutely. It was a good podcast. The last one, Rory. I enjoyed recording that. If you haven’t listened to it, go check it out because it’s in my territory. I’m bound to say that I like it, but we’re talking about adding that style and personality in that episode. And I use the analogy of a person. So when we create a brand, we are bringing a person, a new character to life. And that word that you just said there, the soul. I like that description because it’s, it is almost ethereal what goes on within a brand, right? It is often the first thing that we see or look at or hear, even with a brand that dictates our feelings and how we react.
And so today’s episode, when you just mentioned that title there, visualizing values, it really, it’s a perfect follow on because if we have the early makings of our person, our character of that brand. So I think I use that analogy of a logo being the face of a brand, that face of a person. When you say a person’s name, the first thing you think about is their face, right? Regardless of who they are, you kind of picture that face. That’s for me, the logo’s job. We should have that logo to kind of instantly recognize the business.
And the style and the personality or everything that fits into and around that brand. So for a person that could be the clothes that they wear and how they present themselves to the world with values, this is, it’s a really interesting area. I mean, how do you, where do you start when you want to visualize a value? How will I, or how will we portray a certain value to that audience.
It comes down to, for me anyway, a number of different factors within design. And you can kind of go out there and search all these different meanings for certain elements. And I think colors probably a really good place to start because colors have such a, it’s like a gut feeling sometimes. There’s like an intrinsic reaction to a specific color. And there are psychological reports out there that have evaluated how people react to color. And I think for the start of this episode, to just really touch on that, the most basic of things for a brand is the colors that they will inherit for their brand and the colors they have an impact on.
The value that brand will portray and what it wants to come across. Am I making sense on this side of the microphone?
Rory Holland (03:59.028)
Yeah. And when I hear you say that and what three words I put together, thinking about the values and basically again, indeed the core values of the brand. And then the principles that stand for, and then what are those attributes in the brand and color is definitely a great place to start because it’s a conversation we often have because financial brands tend to pick blue and green. That’s pretty common.
And when clients hire us, they not only hire us because we have the skills and experience and expertise in finance and fintech. And so we understand their business and the ecosystem with which they work in and generally have a pretty good understanding of the market they’re serving and what makes those folks tick, whether businesses or consumers that they’re trying to sell because we’ve been doing this a long time. But it’s so common. They don’t want to look like everybody else. That’s the other reason they come to us is they want to stand out in the crowd.
And so let’s unpack that a little bit because there’s only so many color core primary colors. And when you think about representing and properly visualizing a brand’s core values, talk a little bit more about how color plays into that, because I’ve seen the work that we’ve done and the work that you’ve done and you somehow, it feels like you invent new colors somehow.
Dan (05:28.098)
Well, I promise you I don’t. Or maybe I do, I don’t know. It’s one of the first places that I start when it comes to brand and brand identity. Yeah, there’s the sketching and the kind of, you know, working out the shapes that are gonna make up a logo, but one of the first creative parts and jobs that I do is to kind of get colors, and I’m using that as plural to match them up next to each other and sit them next to each other to see how they look and feel. And we can, I mean, I don’t have to give a specific example, but if a brand that has been through our process and they have their strategy, we’ve analyzed and worked out with them what their mission is and what their core values are. We will know at that stage.
Let’s say for example, security is a really high priority on one of their values, you know, we’re talking the financial sector here and quite often security is a feature in there. And for me, when I’m designing, when I’m pulling things together, I always have to have a reason. So I’m going to go for a little tangent here, but I always have to have a reason for using things that don’t just pick a color and go, yeah, that looks great. Why have you chosen that color? And that’s where that set of core values, that basic understanding the foundations of the brand has to be completed because if I pick a bright yellow, for example, and we know security is one of their core values. That’s going to be hard to justify. Unless there’s a valid reason. And I’m now trying to wrap my brain around why a bank would want to go with the bright and perhaps there are a brand new.
Rory Holland (07:04.004)
Mm-hmm.
Dan (07:23.242)
You know, FinTech startup and they’ve got a completely new take on things. And this yellow, perhaps fitted into what we’d call like a partnering. Core values to something that would sit as, as just as important as that security side of things. So let’s say they, I don’t know, maybe I can’t think of the example, but that we have to have a valid reason for picking these particular colors because they should represent the values.
And to just take it that step ahead, Rory, if we get that right, so when we’re choosing these elements that we want to match up with our foundation, if we get that right, it should resonate and it should resonate with the audience that we are creating the brand for. I’ll let you jump in a second because I just want to add on to that. This is a really hard process for a lot of business owners to get into. The reason being, and this is what I usually find is that they bring their personal taste to the equation. And they’ll say, well, I don’t like that color.
And more often than not, we have to educate and sit back and say, look, we’re not choosing this to decorate your house. We have been through the process and looked at this brand with you. This brand, we want it to resonate with this audience and that’s why we’re choosing this color. And these are just some of those reasons, Rory why, you know, the title suggests that crafting a resonant brand identity is so important and being able to visualize those values that we should have established for the business. You might already have them or we might have worked through them with you.
Does that make sense?
Rory Holland (09:17.908)
It does. And because colors evoke so much emotion, we want to choose colors that do resonate with the audience and are consistent with the brand that we’re developing and we want to evoke those desired emotions. So a couple of things come to mind. When I think of like the color spectrum, blue is like trust and stability. And you’ve got green, which means like.
typically means prosperity and growth. And we see shades of gray that are more, um, more about, could be more about sophistication or professionalism or stability. Um, so it feels like a color palette is, is so critical. And I don’t know if there’s some examples that you can share things we can talk about because they’re all the colors in the rainbow are available to us, but we, we’re very intentional about what we choose from what I hear you saying.
Dan (10:19.086)
Absolutely, specific examples. Yeah, I can put some in the show notes and there’ll be links to brands that we’ve worked on where color palette has really, it’s basically played a big part in how that brand wants to appear and the values that they wanna put across. So we’ve got a couple, so I’ll put them in the show links.
Rory Holland (10:42.0)
Hey, on that note, Dan, we’re 10 minutes in. Can we try something? So you can share screen. I don’t know how it’s going to record, but at the bottom, you should be able to share screen if you want to open whether, you know, it’s AccessOne or Onyx, like I show AccessOne and Onyx lacks are so different color wise.
Dan (11:02.35)
Okay. I was thinking Nexi as well.
Rory Holland (11:06.56)
Well, Nexi too, like you could, you could go bang, bang. Cause you’ve got like the purple or eggplant and then you’ve got the studio or nightclub purple with Nexi and bright. And then you got Onyx, which is completely different.
Dan (11:20.318)
Let me just get AccessOne. AccessOne drive, all AccessOne.
Rory Holland (11:28.652)
Yeah, so if you go to Our Work section, you should be able to pull them up. But it depends on what you want to show, or if you just want to show their main page.
Dan (11:36.546)
So let’s go and AccessOne. Do you know what the domain is for Nexi? Can you remember?
Rory Holland (11:40.457)
Nexi capital.
Rory Holland (11:48.96)
And then if this doesn’t work, we’ll just not show this part.
Dan (11:57.51)
Can’t find Nexi’s, I quite like Nexi as well. Nexycapital.com?
Rory Holland (12:04.696)
nextycapital.com. Yeah. Oh, you know what? No, it’s not.
Dan (12:11.486)
What was the other one you said Onyx?
Rory Holland (12:13.308)
Yeah, it’s Onyx IQ. I’m sorry, it’s go Nexi.Then Onyx IQ and of course AccessOnePay.com
Dan (12:42.702)
Okay, let’s just get rid of those pop-ups there. I don’t know why, tell me next he’s not having an issue. So.
Rory Holland (12:55.244)
Did you find X here? No.
Rory Holland (12:59.316)
Yes, just g-o-nexy.com.
Dan (12:59.627)
Well…
Yeah, it’s not loading it on mine for some reason.
Rory Holland (13:07.48)
Do you want me to share my screen?
Dan (13:11.743)
Yeah, it’s not doing, yeah, you do the next one. I’ll, well, I’ll tell you what you share and I’ll comment. Um, I’ve only got access ones and Onyx up here.
Rory Holland (13:23.268)
So let me…
Dan (13:25.038)
But you do a screen share and I’ll kind of…
Rory Holland (13:26.848)
Where do you want to start next to the Axis Corner Onyx?
Dan (13:34.274)
Go to access one. I didn’t work on the ONIX one, but I can certainly just pass comment on it, can’t I?
Rory Holland (13:40.104)
Yeah. All right. So, Dan, along the lines, we’re talking to you about color palette and how important that is and let’s go ahead and share a few examples so, our listeners can follow us along. So I’m going to start with one that you recall and we can talk with the listeners about AccessOne.
Dan (14:08.118)
That’s right. So AccessOne, this was actually an interesting one, Rory. I’m kind of pleased, but not pleased. I’ve just realized why the colors were specifically on this one. If you remember, as we were going through with this one, we suggested an alternative palette. And for one reason or another, it was an internal matter. But we ended up using and slightly modifying if memory comes to mind, how they use their existing colors.
And this is actually a good example because they had a palette, that wasn’t working for them or so they thought. But what we were actually able to do, having worked through the foundation stuff and analyzing all of that core, the values and the mission, making sure we were on track with that, we were able to say.
If we’re going to stick with these colors, we need to use them in the right way so that we get across the right feeling. And so that one, this project was a really good example of re-crafting, probably the best word to use, but making something feel the way that it probably should have done. Or maybe it did go back in day one and it perhaps lost its way a little bit, but now we’ve got a palette.
That is unique and you wouldn’t look at that and think, this is a financial brand, apart from the fact it says “pay twice” on the kind of fold, but we’ve got colors that are not, you know, indicative of a big financial institution. This one was all about the patients and how they should feel when they’re paying. So yeah, that was AccessOne. Does that ring true now, Rory, do you remember the?
Rory Holland (15:58.581)
Mm-hmm. I do and the success of this one was wonderful to be a part of. It really helped them. We did a big reveal for them in the fall of 2022, so almost a year ago now. And coming off of that reveal to the industry and then to their investors as they continued to scale resulted in a pretty significant capital raise for them. So this was a contributing factor to that. So.
Still working with us today, right? They’re going on a couple of years. We’re continuing to help them scale and acquire new hospitals.
Dan (16:35.502)
Absolutely. And a really good brand actually before we move on, because there were different tiers or different elements to this brand. So it was making sure that values were visualized correctly across everything, all the different services that they used, including some, I think from memory, visualizing stuff that was potentially coming up. And that’s a key one with brands Rory, when they, you know, understanding where they are now, but where they want to be and making sure that is taken into account when you go through an exercise like rebranding, because the job here is to make sure that we’re not repeating the exercise in six months, 12 months. This one was to last, you know, as long as possible.
Rory Holland (17:20.641)
Mm-hmm.Yeah, it’s beautiful. I think that the messaging to support it all too, I know we’re talking about color palette, but, messaging and imagery really came together nicely. All right. You want to take a look at another one?
Dan (17:41.61)
Yeah, I would.
Rory Holland (17:44.78)
All right, let’s, let’s take a look at another one here. How about, how about Nexi?
Dan (17:52.702)
Yeah that was a good one, good colors from memory as well.
Rory Holland (17:55.136)
Mm-hmm. There was a bit of a background with these guys too. If you look at the top bar, Fundamental Capital was their former name. So this went beyond visual branding. This was an actual naming exercise to come up with a new name for this business lender, formerly Fundamental Capital. And then really the objective here was to try to bring the brand to life because it was just a word that.
You know, we kind of created you, identified Dan as part of the branding process. Tell us a little bit about this one. Cause this is such a unique brand. I think it’s beautiful what you’ve done here.
Dan (18:35.414)
Yeah. And with a lot of these brands, there are others out there. Well, most of them, you’re not often going to find some, a business that is just on its own in a marketplace. So when Nexi came to us, it was, as I’ve said before, finding out what makes them different, that’s that part of the brand that as a designer, let me tap into what’s going to be the kind of fundamentals of this creatively.
So when we talk about creating a resonant brand and a brand identity, this one is all about these vibrant entrepreneurs. So these small business entrepreneurs, as that homepage says, this needed to kind of click into that gear in a way. And so you can see from that, we’ve got that gradient going on. We’ve got some really vibrant purple and pink, and that’s different.
Right. And, and the company themselves are very different in how they go about business. And I don’t want to go into the kind of how they do business, but they were adamant throughout all the workshops that we do things differently. This is how we do it. And, and for me, it was making sure that value came across in how they are, how they present themselves to the outside world.
Purple, pink. Don’t see that very often in finance, do you Rory?
Rory Holland (20:08.672)
Don’t see it very often. And I think you nailed it when you said that they do things differently. And I think it, for us, it was, and it continues to be, it continued to be a client of ours now on a couple of years as well. Very refreshing. And this is consistent with our own mission and our own values to make a positive impact in the world through the work that we do. And so Nexi, as is AccessOne, the majority of our clients are reflections of our own mission and values to do good things while we’re on this planet. And so Nexi has been a wonderful client, super exciting. The business lending space has a variety of different players in it. So helping Nexi succeed and grow, stand out, be different was really the initial objective and it’s nice to see it flowing out and them continuing to succeed and grow.
Dan (20:59.726)
And if memory serves me right Rory, I believe one of the founders, when we presented the logo you probably weren’t, I don’t know if you were on the call, she said she might get the tattoo of the logo. You don’t get a higher compliment than that. Yeah, there you go. But yeah, I like the logo, like the colors and it was, it’s really been a really good brand to work with so far.
Rory Holland (21:13.604)
That’s pretty good. If you wanna wear it on your body forever, that’s, man, that’s cool.
Wonderful. Thanks for that, Dan. All right. And we’re going to do about one more.
Dan (21:32.194)
Yeah, that’s how we’ll put on more.
Rory Holland (21:33.612)
All right, so I’m going to throw you a little bit different one. So we’ve looked at some vibrant colors. So we’re going to talk about Onyx IQ.
Dan (21:41.567)
Okay.So, completely different, obviously, to look at.
And you know, this is a good thing to put up because as an example shows that the approach that Onyx has as a brand will be completely different to AccessOne. You know them better than me, but I would imagine that as a business, not quite at polar opposites, but if you look for me anyway as a designer, what I’m seeing is that they’ve got a serif font.
So that’s a lot more literal and a little bit more as I would describe a sage way of appearing. So pretty business minded would be my comment on this one. As opposed to the softer, more warming tones of that AccessOne colors, I mean, is that black? I can’t quite see on my screen here, but yeah.
Rory Holland (22:38.522)
Yeah, it’s black. Yeah. And the one thing I’d like about what you said there, yeah, it’s, this is a reflection of their values. Very business minded, their founder and CEO, has been in the industry for decades and he designed. And launched, pre-launched basically the software with us and really from the perspective of a business lender himself and understanding the underwriting process and that the whole process needed to be broken and recreated.
And so that’s Onyx in automating the entire, and what we use the word with them, supercharging the lending process through automated software. And so if our audience doesn’t know the founder of this company, they may, Jay, but this is a direct reflection of the values he wanted to represent in a visual manner and in words.
So it’s really neat to see CJ and Onyx succeed and his team grow. And this has been another success story. They’ve made it, managed to get to profitability as a software company in less than a year, and we continue to help drive their pipeline. And it’s a big testament to this is how the brand’s been recognized, perceived, and giving us all that we need to be consistent, be coherent, and build credibility and trust because of the consistency that’s built into the brand. And then how now we’re able to take that out and reflect it in ongoing marketing and sales.
Dan (24:29.742)
I love it. The one thing that I was actually just going to comment on, not just for this brand, but with brands in general is they evolve, right? And there’s nothing to say that in, I don’t know, two years, three years, five years Onyx may revisit and feel like it doesn’t suit or fit some of the way that they’ve progressed. Businesses progress, businesses grow. And it doesn’t mean a full rebrand, but it can mean a bit of a reevaluation at times. And I’m not saying that for Onyx, but with businesses out there, they can reach various milestones where, especially after events like the pandemic, where a lot of businesses had to shift how they operate and how they practice and I think sometimes you find yourself in this zone of not quite realizing or not quite recognizing the business that is set out. And that’s at the stage for me where brand steps up to the plate, because that should be a revisit of what your original goals are, where you are now, where you’re heading.
Rory Holland (25:54.856)
Yeah, and you referenced it people, brands are like people. They evolve. We learn, we grow, we succeed. We may make mistakes. We have the valleys and we have the peaks. So brands are very similar and how we as marketers help leaders of the brands we support and new ones that we’ll be working with take advantage of and learn from the challenges.
By applying whether that’s, you know, we’re often launching new products and new services from, from existing brands. When brands that our audience may know, our listeners may know, come to us and say, “Hey, we want to launch a new product. We want to really get out there and make an impact. Can you help us?” Or, you know, we mentioned Onyx as a startup from a seasoned founder, they needed to get out from ground zero, but now we’re a couple of years in.
Now we’re looking at it, not only new product features that are rolling out based on the needs of the current audience, but we’re looking at new audiences and maybe new brand new products that are going to come off of it. So I think what you’re describing makes sense because of the, sometimes the bumpy road and sometimes the hockey stick growth in either event, times change. Businesses need to change too. And the brands need to stay consistent and grow with that as well to stay relevant and.
That’s part of this fun part is, you know, some of the ones that we showed you, like AccessOne, was an existing brand. They’ve been around for a while, but they needed to grow with the times and take advantage of a new product, a new mobile product that they wanted to release and they had a new audience that they needed to appeal to. So it gave them the chance to not only better look at the current audience they needed to continue to support and grow. How could they better appeal to them?
But it gave us a chance too, to look at how do we support this new product offering, this new audience that we want to appeal to and do it, basically succeeded both.
Dan (28:00.946)
AccessOne is an incredible success story. I think we’ve spoken about it on earlier episodes, but just to sort of underline what you were saying there about evolving it. Do you think that businesses, I sometimes get the impression that some businesses feel scared with that word brand because it’s a bit of an unknown or they think it’s you know, I don’t think they understand often the value that it brings to the table. And I mean, the crafting, visualizing values is the name of this episode. Well, that brand, it has such far reaching values.
Rory Holland (28:53.384)
Yeah, and as executives or leaders of companies, and this is just the many, many of those folks I’ve worked with over the years, some I think most of them do recognize the value of brand, but it’s not something that’s super tangible. It’s not like numbers on a spreadsheet. So understanding the importance, I think they do.
Dan (29:14.338)
Yeah.
Rory Holland (29:21.108)
For the most part, if I may be so bold, I think most people understand it’s important. I think what they don’t understand is the value you get from doing it right versus not doing it right. And what is doing it right versus not doing it right mean? Because a lot of people say the same kinds of things. Cause there’s an art and a science to it. So there’s a lot of, I find faith and trust that goes in when clients hire us based on our track record to help them build these multimillion dollar brands or take the multimillion dollar brand that exists today and make it bigger and stronger.
So I hear you. I think it’s to me, I would just counter that. I think it’s less about the understanding or seeing value in it, but more about not understanding the value and how to measure it.
Dan (30:13.866)
Yeah, I go with that. I also think that the more open and more honest that we are with our clients, the better the outcome for the brand. Because like you just said that they don’t necessarily understand what, you know, the kind of the implications are.
And it’s not about pulling the wool over people’s eyes with brand. It’s about often just telling the story of that brand and helping them reach out at every corner of what they do in the right way. And you’ve got to be honest when you do that, you’ve got to, got to do some soul searching and you’ve got to sit down and find out what it is you want to get across. You know, and that’s what we do.
Rory Holland (31:13.1)
Yeah. And that’s what’s, that’s what’s neat. When we think about the components, like a couple of things we wanted to make sure people got from today is examples of how core values look expressed into a brand without us necessarily unpacking these three clients core values. I think you get a sense of what they are. And we’ve talked a little bit about that. So I think one thing I’m hearing you say is it’s really important that as part of this process that the companies define their core values to make sure we can have something to design against that everybody buys into.
Dan (31:54.142)
Yeah, absolutely. Because a picture without a frame does not carry as much presence as one in a frame on a wall. There you go. There’s a kind of weird analogy for art, but, you know, what I’m trying to get at here is for, as a designer, creating brand and brand identity, whether it’s logo or the elements that go with it.
If it isn’t backed up with evidence, it’s so hollow. And then that’s just what I was saying about being honest. You know, if you can explain something to somebody, you’re telling that story. And then that gives it, you know, a valid reason to exist.
Rory Holland (32:40.096)
Mm-hmm. One thing that’s important, it has to be true. Otherwise it’s hollow. And we’re intuitive, we’re intuitive beings. And so I think people and businesses that you might want to try to work with can intuit that if it doesn’t feel genuine and authentic and true, hence the process when you use the word workshops, part of our process to help you help our clients get to get to the core values and then how they can be expressed.
And I think that’s the danger of leaders of companies not recognizing the importance and the potential value of a properly done developed brand is that you end up with something that is designed, I mean it’s created, but it isn’t designed and created from truth.
Dan (33:37.874)
Yeah, we’ve gone very deep on this episode Rory, I like it.
Rory Holland (33:43.328)
Hey, it’s this what we do. We help our clients succeed through these types of processes. So it’s been fun to share it. Awesome. Anything else you want to share about this topic or close us out?
Dan (34:00.634)
I don’t think I need to add anything else in for this episode. I mean, we’re always here to talk brand. If anything that you’ve listened to kind of makes you want to ask questions, hit us up on, we’ve got the email, we’ve got social, and obviously we’ve got the CSTMR website, so we’re always here to talk brand. We love a good discussion. I don’t really want to add anything else onto this particular episode. The next one coming up.
We’re still in creative area. It’s the final one of this mini series Rory, we are talking about creating the perfect logo. What’s going to go into a memorable logo. How do we do that?
Rory Holland (34:44.832)
Awesome, looking forward to that one, Dan. Well, thanks so much, folks, for listening. Well, join us for the next one.
Dan (34:48.77)
Thank you. Absolutely. See you all soon.
