Right Angle | February Newsletter - My Beloved Brand

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BRAND NEW KIND OF LOVE

Despite what you might think, it’s entirely possible to fall out of love with your brand. But it’s okay! Your relationship with your brand is always worth saving. More importantly, if you don’t love your brand, how can you expect anyone else to love it?

There’s nothing wrong with wanting better for yourself and your company. Most of the world’s major brands (i.e., Target, Apple, UPS) have undergone brand counseling, resulting in some of the greatest business turnarounds in history. The companies each fell into personality ruts and went to extreme lengths to save what it cared about. You can do the same.

The first step is to figure out why you’re out of love. Has your logo gotten stale? Your website become dated? Or is it something cultural or environmental? Have an honest discussion with yourself and your Brand Manager about what’s not working for you. Ask yourself what worked before and try to see if it’s something you want to recapture or something you want to reinvent from scratch.

The dimensional aspects of your brand (visual, verbal, cultural, and environmental) can all be adjusted with strategic plans of action. Enhance your vibe, and people will notice. Best of all, you’ll fall back in love.

At the end of the day, your brand is an extension of yourself. With your customers’ help, you’ve cultivated something that resonates. Your brand might need a makeover, but it’s rarely worth breaking up over.

I WANNA BE LOVED BAYOU

For more than 20 years, the Bayou Vermilion District (BVD) has worked to beautify, conserve, and manage sites along the Bayou Vermilion. With its sub-departments and tourist destinations including Vermilionville Living History Museum and Folklife Park, and La Cuisine De Maman Cajun and Creole Restaurant, BVD ensures the preservation and enhancement of many natural and cultural resources of Lafayette Parish.

For years, BVD and all of its preservation branches operated under two logos: one for BVD and the other for Vermilionville. The marks served them well, but over time, each had become “dusty” and dated. They didn’t represent the progressive, proactive mission of the organization, nor did they differentiate all bodies operating under the umbrella — how could anyone distinguish the restaurant from the Folklife Park? It was time to give BVD the identity it deserved.

Right Angle was charged with executing a complete rebrand of the BVD system, including logos, taglines, paper systems, digital outlets, and more, for the governing body and each of the sub-branches. Using a subtle water-drop shape, we developed three different logos, one for each of the departments. Each logo is made up of traditional symbols inherent to the entity. We wanted to fairly represent the entire scope of the BVD experience, so we branded each separate department with a unique identity.

The result is a colorful, energetic federation of logos, taglines, and paper systems that take BVD out of the past and into the future.

THE APPLE OF MY EYE

Let’s be honest — there may be more smart phone applications (apps) than stars in the sky. There’s an overwhelming number of apps that do everything from predict your future to manage your finances. Around the Right Angle office, we like to keep our app collections lean, focusing on what’s useful and what’s entertaining.

We also appreciate apps that can do more for brands. An app that can give your audience an inside view of who you are is good for business. Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter can create open dialogue between you and your audience. Similarly, apps can help you expand your fanbase and create deep connections with like-minded individuals. Two apps that are asserting the visual identity of brands are Instagram and Vine.

Brands like Starbucks, Forever21, Sharpie, and Pepsi have taken to Instagram, the popular photo editing and sharing network, as a major mobile marketing tool, giving their fans a complete visual perception of who they are.

Vine, a brand new app that lets the user create six-second videos without the luxury of editing, is catching on like wildfire among early adopters. Trident, Ritz, and Dove are using Vine to show virtual representations of their stories.

Both Instagram and Vine can potentially play into the strategies of your company’s social media marketing. The important thing to remember is that every post should represent an affirmation of your brand.