New Technology Driving Branding Design
Marketing teams are now looking to the design of the company branding to deliver high level messaging to the target audience, as ‘Complete’ has done with their new vehicle branding.
We are all aware that company branding plays a crucial role in delivering the right ‘tone of voice’ to your target market. This is nothing new and has been done successfully since ancient times; in places like ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, by marketers to explain their offerings to a mostly illiterate populace; they hung pictorial signs and painted their carts and store fronts. But today we are seeing branding being taken to a new level where messaging is being delivered in the brand design itself – not as an adjunct.
This effort to develop a communication pathway is called ‘Brand Messaging’, and this technique allows marketers to convey important values to encourage the target market to engage.
Sustainability is on everyone’s lips these days and rightly so. All organisations should be showing how they are tackling the issues concerning the environment. In the case of the ‘Complete’ fleet, the marketing team decided to use brand messaging to inform the audience that, where appropriate, electric vehicles are being in-fleeted to reduce the ‘Complete’ carbon footprint.
How do you incorporate a direct brand message?
The initial designs were developed by the Complete marketing team, and they were sent to James Parry (head of creative design at Mediafleet) to finalise and ‘work up’ into official Mediafleet 2D proof documents. 3D presentations were also created to give the ‘Complete’ team the opportunity to visualise the branding without requiring a physical prototype.
Now for the clever bit!
The Complete marketing team added a crucial identifier to the branding – this informed the audience whether the vehicle was powered by ‘Electricity’ or whether it was conventionally powered. And they achieved this without corrupting the brand or the brand values.
James Parry stated, “It was really cool to take a brand design element, subtly change it, and let that deliver such a clear message. Some other Mediafleet customers are using visual prompts to indicate the vehicle is an EV but taking the figure eight/infinity loop within the brand design, making it green against the black backdrop was a stroke of genius. The Diesel version had a less exciting monotone infinity loop. Put these two types of vehicles side by side and it would be clear that one is powered by electricity at a glance – delivering important brand messaging.
The vehicles were fully wrapped and are actually white vehicles underneath the vinyl. ‘Complete’ even went as far as to wrap the entire roof sections to ensure that their branding/messaging could be read by people inside office spaces or high-rise buildings. Mediafleet used digitally printed Arlon 6000XRP for the base wrap, and each vehicle was installed by the Mediafleet fitting team – some at our Witney facility, and some at sites across the ‘Complete’ network.
Complete provide an extensive range of services to customers large and small all over the UK, seamlessly enabling them to run more efficiently by helping them reduce the number of suppliers they have to deal with which ultimately reduces the overall cost of their procurement. By placing customers at the heart of everything we do, Complete has built an enviable reputation as the ‘go to’ company for a wide range of business supplies and services.
