Designing a West London Heritage brand

Brand strategy and Identity

Designing a West London Heritage brand

We were commissioned to create a brand strategy and identity for Good Design & Build (GDB), an interior design and architecture firm based in west London. We sought to position them as a heritage brand that conjures up the nostalgia of dream-like living in 19th-century London. Inspired by the old maxim of a ‘home is your castle’, we looked at what would happen if we could turn a service firm into a secret society/concierge, like an institution that emulates customers’ lives.

The project itself was split into 3 phases: discovery, strategy and design. We initially sat down with the leadership at GDB to understand how they wanted to be perceived in the marketplace and how their competitors were positioned, the price point of commissioned projects and project fees they wanted to aspire to, and how they wanted to be perceived in terms of values and personality inside and outside the business.
Once customer information was captured, we sourced participants and planned customer interviews to gauge how customers wanted them to be from a customer experience perspective.

This was done remotely with a range of customers, using C-B demographics. We unpacked their tastes, attitudes and experiences of dealing with interior and exterior service firms, as well as their underlying goals and aspirations regarding the pieces. We identified numerous insights that would make the future GDB brand resonate with the customer, and formulated a comprehensive buyer study that outlined key themes that were used to form the future brand strategy:
• How the customer wanted to be engaged and common communication
• Their perception of costs vs perceived value
• How they shortlisted vendors
• What was expertise to them
• The difference between premium and luxury.
We did a deep dive into the wider community and context to map the process of what was going on in the neighbourhood.

The strategic phase synthesised the research into a blueprint for action and established principles of how the brand could capitalise on customer behaviour alongside our vision. The final document outlined the path GDB needed to take to be a ‘best in class’ design lead construction studio.

The brand was reintroduced into the marketplace as a high-end boutique to meet their objective of growing revenue and justify a price increase to serve a higher-end customer segment. This complemented other premium British heritage brands and looked to capitalise on neighbourhood culture and unify output around a content strategy focusing on local addresses.

While outlining the beginnings of the tone and voice, we proposed a framework for engaging customers, emphasising areas of the buyer journey to raise key customer experience moments as hero moments to develop.

Architecting the nieghbourhood based customer experience

The Combination Mark

The combination mark was drawn, based on envy, which was an insight identified in the research. People are immensely proud of their home and want everyone to be envious when they look at it.

We incorporated iconography into the combination mark which was representative of that. It included a peacock – one of the original symbols of envy – with its feathers radiating out of a home.

The symbol was unapologetically nicknamed the GDB ‘Crown’ and part of the combination mark symbolised the stamp of approval. To maintain the authority and consistency of the message, the guidance of usage of the combination mark and wordmark was needed. This was applied to all the apparel when it was secondary to the application of the business message.

The Capital O

We wanted the drawing of the wordmark to communicate something elegant, precise, but also traditional with an element of modernity.
The idea of the wordmark was to leverage the capital O to emulate widened eyes. It is narrow to convey a sense of pride and tension but the aperture of the G is consistently wider to allow more white space and give it a modern feel, while rounded off serifs ensure the wordmark isn’t too sharp and intimidating.

The Direction

When it came to forging the new identity and combination mark, we explored and experimented with the values. We discovered architects that represented the concept of ‘Britishness’, and looked at how the culture and aesthetic had changed over history and the impact it’s had on the design of things.
It was about striking a balance between modernism, a more minimal aesthetic and the aesthetic of a more decadent time.
When we looked at the materials, fittings, and textures, it was clear why a certain fabric or metal would be unsuitable. Ultimately, we created a mood and vision that represented a more optimistic, decadent dream of 19th-century London, and we looked at striking a balance between that feeling and formulating a modern company

Good Design & build values, Sophisticated, Commanding, Focused & Percise, reserved yet proud

Marketing slogans illustrating Good Design and Build

Unifying messaging with colour

With the wider identity, we wanted to create a system of usage around the assets and unify that with the colour palette, so the different types of messages could be communicated in different styles.
The strategy was to create and emulate a storybook feeling to the firm, and anything attributed to it.
We wanted to strike a tone by using a pink that gave the feeling of ‘the sun that never sets. Undertones of red gave the colour a fixed sunset hue that continued the narrative of creating a dreamscape for people’s lifestyles.

Marketing patterny for Good Design and Build

The assets themselves unified the purpose and colour. The scaffolding banner was addressed as a bookmark with graphic devices that emulated the graphics of old book covers. Burnt Sienna represented the construction area of the business and communicated a ‘workhorse’ feeling, in comparison to corporate communication, which was racing green with gold trim.
We unified everything with lithographic-style illustrations to frame the narrative with iconography. This was associated with the Chiswick area to create story connotations.

We also looked into the types of photography used and their purpose. We evaluated the competitors, their strategic usages and benchmarked content that was successful from a social media perspective. We also provided direction on types of imagery and the style, coining the phrase ‘muted magic’.
We directed compositions of work to be treated as a scene, with added art direction to leverage photographic devices, such as clear focal points and symmetrical composition, and contrast textures with fixtures and fittings and recommended niche-brand collaborations.

With the final guidelines drawn up and all the assets created handed over, the leadership team remarked that we’d reinvigorated the reason they had gone into business in the first place, and had driven them to start the process of creating a group portfolio targeting luxury clients.
As with all our clients, we’re so thankful that they decided to commission us and we’re looking forward to seeing the positive impact of our work on changing the perception of their business.

Thoughts around the future of brand narrative

Brand Strategy

Generative Research to find and frame problems

Research

Thinking around defining unique aesthetics for brand strategy

Brand Design

Using Systems thinking to make sense of any subject matter

Information Architecture