Prepass Safety Alliance Rebrand
This is a brief story about how a public-private partnership was able to wrangle all its stakeholders, communicate well, and pull off a rebrand.
A Public-Private Rebrand
Large groups of stakeholders sometimes present a challenge when branding because of their diverse points of view and the need to make each stakeholder feel heard. You need a process that can accommodate this broad scope of feedback.
It’s not for the faint of heart.
This is a brief story about how a public-private partnership, with good internal leadership, was able to wrangle all its stakeholders, communicate well and pull off a rebrand.
We were brought in to help create a coherent, united brand in a public-private partnership called HELP, Inc, looking to change their name to something more powerfully indicative of what they actually do.
As an organization with several stakeholders, they had to do it with several people involved in the process. This always presents a challenge, simply because it means cataloging more information from diverse points of view. But with the help of PrePass leadership, combined with the guidance of the CMO, and the staff, we were able to drive the process quickly.
Brand Definition and Naming
Brand Discovery became a two-part workshop because the client needed to sync with its core group, and then involve several other stakeholders in a later meeting. So we met with them initially at their offices with five or six people who represented different parts of the organization.
We built relationships during that meeting with a hard-driving leadership that took their job very seriously and helped to drive the renaming process forward.
From the beginning, it was important to all of us that the rename respected their history. It had to reflect what the industry thinks and knows about them, and use that to the brand's advantage. When the final naming decision came back, it was the name of their flagship product, PrePass.
Always drive for safety
Committed to service
Act with integrity
Partner for results
Exemplify leadership
We helped Prepass define their brand values.
Brand Values, Personality Traits, and Name
Later, we met with a larger group of around sixteen stakeholders from both public and private sectors and worked through values, personality traits, and brand story. We knew the number of voices would create a challenge, so we broke the group up into teams. The chief marketing officer was key to the success of the project. He knew how to move things forward internally, and helped navigate the entire process, providing leadership for us, so that things could get done on time.
The CMO then led us in fine-tuning the values and personality traits. We brought in additional creative talent to deepen and speed up the process.
We worked rigorously with the CMO to make final changes, changes that we all agreed needed to be made to fine-tune things.
PrePass Brand Personality Traits
When we act like who we are, people believe us.
Principled
We boldly stand for our values and do not stray from our purpose. We don’t perform halfway. We create goals. We strategically plan. And we execute. At the end of the day, we do it right or we don’t do it at all.
Inquisitive
We ask questions first, understand the problem, and then develop solutions. This problem-solving and curious nature provides both resiliency to change and the ability to expose issues, improving the world around us.
Intelligent
We assert our competency through knowledge of the industry, its issues and our solutions. And if we don’t have an answer, we search for it. Then, we share this knowledge within the internal organization.
Dependable
We build trust with stakeholders and customers by consistently doing what we say we will do. This is established through honesty, authenticity and consistent reliability. A corporate professionalism is rooted in our diligence and preparation.
Visual Guidelines and Logo
We kicked the design process off with mood boards to help determine the visual direction in a slightly less-formal way, allowing the client to feel their way into their visual style. We brought in additional design resources in a creative director because we needed to finish on-time and with a very good result for this client. He, along with our designer, pushed the mood board process to a high level.
Once we got the mood boards nailed down, we moved on to thumbnails, where our creatives continued to push logo concepts. We showed some concepts to the client that captured and accentuated brand traits discovered in the earlier part of the branding process.
The client chose a refinement of an existing style they’d been using quite successfully. We agreed with this decision since it allowed them to maintain much of the cache they’d developed with the previous logo while adding refinements that modernized their look and feel.
Public-Private Partnerships Need Trust
In the end, we generated their brand guidelines (both visual and verbal), their logo in all its forms, and an implementation plan for the rollout of the brand.
The key to running a public-private partnership is to build trust right off the bat. Stakeholders bring vastly different points of view, and they all need to feel heard. So the rebranding process must organize all points of view, find the areas where everybody agrees, and then develop that into a brand that can lead meaningfully.
And we would be remiss if we didn't mention their team. The quality of clients that we are privileged to work with