Thought

No big reveals: How iterative branding drives lasting change

Johanna Drewe

Big brand reveals are seductive; after all, it’s only human to enjoy the anticipation of a wait, followed by an adrenaline-laced ‘ta-da!’ But at Output, we don’t do big ta-das.

It’s not that we don’t value the ceremony and drama of pivotal meetings, and capturing the excitement of a business on the cusp of change – that’s important. But for us, branding is about the collaboration and iteration that ignites ideas, engages teams, and inspires belief in a shared vision. True impact doesn’t come from disappearing into a design bubble for six weeks and unveiling something finished – it comes from creating it together.

The Output process is set up to, instead, bring our clients on the journey with us. It’s something we know brands are talking about, as they look for agencies that will be less external, removed partners, and more an embedded part of their business.

We believe in fostering close partnerships with our clients, to understand what makes a company distinctive and differentiated, what challenges they face and where they want to go, and then work hand-in-hand to build a living brand system that will get them there.”

So you’ll still get the big brand bang but we’ll also give you the site framework, campaign ideas, inspiration for internal design teams, brand activations, tools to get senior buy-in, direction for social strategy and all the other things that might not be listed in the deliverables. And we’ll check in with you every step of the way.

One of the ways we’re able to do that is by bringing brand and digital disciplines together under one agency roof, and borrowing ways of thinking and working from one another. It means brand thinking isn’t just a top layer, but built into how things work. From campaigns to platforms, we connect brand to function, so every activation feels intentional and aligned.

Yes, they have two different approaches to challenges, and they remain two different teams – you only have to peep into our Figma projects to see how differently they think and work – but bringing them alongside one another creates a wonderful kind of chaos. It’s a push and pull that prompts wildly different approaches to clients’ challenges – and, we believe, wildly better outcomes.

 

Challenging historic processes 

In the old way of doing things, digital work only begins once the brand work is finished. That means a brand team sets the vision without showing systematic thinking on a more granular level, and the digital team ends up with a billboard that translates to a site header and nothing else.

In contrast, by setting up our brand and digital teams to work together, both sides are equally involved from the get-go. They work on a shared timeline, they have different approaches to clients’ challenges and they push each other to better outcomes; neither one can do without the other.

It’s a process that’s iterative, collaborative and adaptive; three pillars that have become deeply embedded in the philosophy of our studio.

Iterate and collaborate

The iterative part is particularly critical. Iterative design is a methodology based on a cyclic process of prototyping, testing, analysing and refining a product or process. We use it to build stronger brands.

Where the ‘big reveal’ approach to branding involves an agency going away for weeks on end – and spending ages on something that’s potentially completely wrong – we sketch and share initial brand territories as early as possible.

We then test those across real-world tangible applications, and we do it in partnership with our client, our stakeholders and sometimes even the audience too. By regularly sharing and trialing the development of our work in this way, we create a continuous stream of feedback.

 

That allows us to understand a client’s actual appetite for bravery. When they talked to us about wanting to be innovative and truly distinctive, did they mean it? How disruptive is their version versus ours? Are we pushing things too far, or not far enough?”

Being iterative and collaborative gives us a concrete answer to these questions. We engage all levels of the business in our process, including the C-Suite, the managers and the design teams, to make sure everyone’s needs are met. And because clients have been hands-on with the process and creation, it means they’re more faithful to the brand, more able to bring it to life in the best way and more likely to get maximum business impact from the work.

Trust the process

Doing things this way requires a level of trust in the process, and a willingness to embrace the unknown. Clients might be used to feeding into projects with an agency on the strategy side of things, but not so much the brand and digital development. And our designers have also had to get  used to this process and learn how to embrace the roughness of work. This is hard; designers are perfectionists, which means this goes against their nature.

Instinctively, people often want to jump ahead, but by spending a bit more time on the workings-out, we can get to a more appropriate and effective final outcome. It encourages all of us to be more curious, and rather than that one eureka moment, there are many.

It’s a process that we know works. And we have results. When we work with clients, any initial brand ideas are established early on and in partnership with the digital team – who then help test the idea in a digital context. Together, we can identify areas for brand expression, as well as places the system might fall down digitally, and then evolve the brand accordingly. It makes for brand work that’s practical and deployable, and digital work that’s a true expression of the brand vision.

Learn, adapt, learn, adapt

Of course the process isn’t perfect, and we wouldn’t truly be committed to iterative branding if we weren’t also constantly learning from and fine-tuning our own process. Output is continually adapting itself for our clients and for the best possible outcomes for those clients. The reality is that there’s no such thing as a golden process; no client or project is the same, so our process can’t remain static.

But while we constantly adapt to the needs of the project, our core principles remain steady: mutual feedback and true collaboration with our clients and our teams. We believe it’s the way forward to create genuinely transformational brands that continue to deliver once they’re in the wild. Clients can expect actual, long term change for their business, rather than hypotheticals that never get used, or a superficial brand that has no framework for deployment and activation.

Ultimately, collaboration is messy, and it should be messy. And if we have to embrace a little bit of artful chaos to get there? Bring it on.

 

If you’re interested in exploring our approach, why not get in touch to find out more?

Artwork

Gianluca Alla 

Johanna Drewe

Working in brand or digital agencies, Johanna (she/her) wondered why the disciplines weren’t more joined up. As Creative Director and Partner at Output, she ensures both are developed with equal imagination and rigour. A design leader in a male-dominated industry, she’s interested in representing women and underserved groups, using her experience and learnings to empower a new generation of female designers.

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