Global Brand Building

I’m fascinated by how we let brands help define who we are. They motivate us to make decisions, align with our political beliefs, change how we feel about ourselves.

As EYELEVEL’s first brand manager, I helped kickstart a department as part of the Design and Innovation segment that would bring vocabulary and tangible realization to what had already been created organically over the years. But first, we had to launch.

Fourteen offices around the world needed to be globally aligned, yet we also emphasized celebrating individual regional personalities.

Challenge

We were challenged to reimagine a 20-year-old brand that had no previous brand marketing team, structure, or strategy. On top of being a true values-based company, we needed to reframe our narrative to reflect and unite the diverse and energetic spirit of teams around the world, while also respecting their individual regional and cultural strengths; 14 different offices globally to be exact.

Solution

Starting with listening, we conducted internal and client questionnaires, extensive interviewing, inter-company reflection and analysis, we were able to reframe and articulate what people connected with about the existing brand. This analysis gave us the ability to prioritize what we should shed from the narrative that we had built without leaving behind what made us, us - and what was revealed in the research: a never-back-down mentality , passion for perfection, values-based business practice, and above all: that the EYELEVEL brand was made up of the people who dedicated their energy to making it a success.

As part of the rebrand, we needed to imagine and produce the following:

• Fresh brand guidelines (along with allllllll the accompanying documents, templates, swag, you name it)

• A new website

• Top-down communications and rollout strategy that involved change management

• A functioning company intranet

• Launch events

Result

After nearly a full year of preparation, the result was a dynamic yet familiar brand persona that team members could identify with and bond with, and that could ultimately connect individual offices with the rest of the global team.