After I wrote Legally Branded I remained deeply interested in brands and branding. I read a lot about the subject and after reading Visual Hammer – Nail your Brand into the Mind with the Emotional Power of a Visual by Laura Ries I was keen to get a visual hammer for my business.

The book argued that every consumer has two brains, one verbal and one visual. The aim is to bring both sides of the brain together in your visual identity to marry your strategy with your creative. The visual dimension should add an emotional connection to the brand.

Inspired by the book, I had a bull icon created for the Azrights brand and it was tacked onto the existing logo which had by now undergone various tweaks as I didn’t want to emphasise the a-z element in our name and instead just use the word as a composite whole. The logo had initially been designed to have the a-z in a different colour to separate the a-z from the word rights.

Changing the logo and adding elements to it such as our tagline, easy legal not legalese over time had resulted in a messy look. This is what it looked like.

So when a designer approached me with the suggestion of refreshing my brand, I agreed it was time to rethink the logo. However, I did say I wanted a visual hammer.

I was unwilling to change the name Azrights when this was suggested – not because I think it is a great name, but because I had been using it for nearly 10 years. There was no good reason to change it. For the rest I was happy to defer to the designer’s ideas.

The fact that it resulted in us discarding all our existing branding (including the tagline, easy legal not legalese, which was a registered trademark) did not bother me as I had little attachment to any of it. But I was a little disappointed not to get a visual hammer, although I accepted that none of the ideas for one suited the logos she created.

I was happy enough with the new logo. This is what it looked like, along with a tagline to emphasise our positioning.

Jenni Romaniuk’s book, Building Distinctive Brand Assets has much to say about brand assets and designers’ tendency to discard the old in favour of the completely new.

She emphasises the importance of being respectful of brand assets, counselling designers to resist the temptation to redesign or otherwise ‘fiddle’ with these assets.

Interestingly she cites the example of Tropicana whose redesigned visual to be more premium resulted in the oranges on their boxes being dropped. While the new design certainly created a more upmarket look it also resulted in the loss of a ton of sales.

The design team had done some research before changing the branding, but their research had focused on the wrong questions – instead of establishing how famous and unique the oranges on the packaging were they had focused on whether the absence of the oranges gave the packaging a more premium look.

Adding a Visual Hammer to the Azrights Brand

This year Azrights took advantage of new regulations from the Solicitors’ Regulation Authority enabling solicitors to run non-regulated law firms, so that I closed Azrights Solicitors, the regulated law firm I had run since 2005. In its place I used Azrights International Ltd (an ordinary company which I had set up to offer online courses).

The main change is that we no longer handle full scale litigation in court proceedings. Also, I have created Brand Tuned to offer brand coaching and mentoring services.

These changes justified making some adjustments to our branding, and I particularly wanted to get that visual hammer that I had craved ever since reading Laura Ries’ book back in 2013.

The New Designer’s Approach

The designer I briefed to create an icon to fit with the existing Azrights logo promptly announced that he thought it was a bad idea to tack on new elements to existing brand designs. He wanted to create a completely new brand, new logo, new fonts, new colouring, the lot.

This was probably predictable given designers’ tendency to want to start with a clean slate. The first designer had not found a basis for an icon despite starting with a complete clean slate, and now here was this designer telling me to rebrand just to add an icon.

I really did not want to completely rebrand, and this was the very scenario I had tried to avoid. I had assumed that by explaining upfront that I only wanted a visual hammer he had taken on the brief in good faith.

One problem was that he advised that we needed to find a meaningful reason for an icon, and he could not think of one. So, I suggested trying a sextant, which is an instrument for measuring distances between objects, especially in navigation. He came up with some designs, which did not work with the existing logo, so would have needed a new logo.

However, a bigger problem was that when we did an availability search on the sextant logo, we found an Italian law firm which was using a sextant in their logo, and they were actually called Sextant!

https://trademarks.ipo.gov.uk/ipo-tmcase/page/Results/4/EU014037758

How to Address Potential Conflicts

Whenever availability searches throw up a problem you need to consider your appetite for risk. You can decide to accept the risk and maybe set aside a contingency budget for litigation, or if you want to avoid a dispute then choose a different design. I opted for the latter route.

Given that the designer had no ideas and just wanted to rebrand us, there did not seem any point in continuing to use him, so we parted company.

I decided to create the icon myself with the help of a talented young designer Iva Michalo who I had found a few years back to help with ad hoc design work. She is happy to implement my ideas which is exactly what I wanted after my frustrating experiences trying to get a visual hammer to add to my logo.

I remembered the bull icon we had previously used had been chosen it to denote branding. It was the reason the cover of my book uses cattle too. This led to the idea of a ram as an icon to signify branding.

Rams reflect strength, the power to overcome, and achieve breakthroughs. They denote action, the fifth element of heroism. When you bear in mind that I am an Aries, the star sign of which is associated with a ram, it seemed a perfect fit to use a ram as the basis our icon.

Iva did a great job of creating a ram icon. Here is the logo now. It fits perfectly with the existing Azrights logo, and I took the opportunity to reinstate our tagline because it is a bad idea to hard wire your positioning into a tagline. Lawyers for the digital world may have been a unique positioning back in 2014, but in an increasingly digital world, it soon dates. That is why it is generally advisable to not reflect your positioning in a tagline.

What made the ram icon even more perfect was that there were no conflicts with any existing logo registrations by law firms or branding agencies!

Meaningless Distinctiveness

As Brand Tuned is an endorsed brand, it needed its own separate branding, albeit that it needs to sit well with the Azrights branding.

So when it came to choosing what to create as an icon for Brand Tuned I was guided by the research by Byron Sharp and his team at the Ehrenberg-Bass institute and opted for meaningless distinctiveness. I just chose an owl. There was no rationale for it. Iva then produced this icon. Here it is sitting alongside the logo:

Personally, I think you can always make up a story to explain why you use a particular symbol anyway, after you have chosen something. So, if you believe you need to have a reason for your choice of icon then make up a story around it.

If my experience is anything to go by it is extremely difficult for business owners to achieve the branding they want, and to build distinctive assets gradually. Designers are quick to suggest a new logo or to want to tinker with them and even to completely change your brand identity.

Romaniuk’s book demonstrates that rebranding or “brand refreshes” are rarely the answer even to brand performance issues. She suggests sticking with your assets even if consumers describe the brand as “old fashioned”.  The brand assets themselves are rarely a driver of weakening brand image or sales decline.

My Journey to Get a Visual Hammer

We are living in interesting times when it comes to branding because as Romaniuk’s opening remarks in her book puts it:

“Despite advances in our understanding of how the brain, memory and buyer behaviour work, much of the advice on building a strong brand identity is tied up in folklore, pop psychology or based on out-of-date brand strategies. Books on the topic tend to see brand identity as a design exercise, with aesthetics at the core of choices, or inextricably tie brand identity with brand positioning, which is akin to stamping an expiry date on your branding efforts.”

The more I have learnt about branding the more I have realised just how much nonsense is out there. Many designers don’t like their clients to have their own ideas so maybe that should be a warning sign to avoid using a designer. Make sure you choose one who wants to work in a collaborative way with you to help you to achieve the best possible visual identity for your brand – ideally one who reads the new information emerging about marketing science and who updates their methods accordingly.

I have had to understand what branding involves because I am writing a book on it. Most business owners do not know who to believe, and what the right approach is when branding their business.

Conclusion

In my own case, I have realised that the more ideas I have the better my chances of getting an effective visual identity.

The brand assets you create have intrinsic value to the consumer, and a brand could lose custom if its potential customers cannot find it.

Next week I will discuss distinctive brand assets such as visual hammers and what you need to take into account, including from an intellectual property perspective, when deciding how to design your brand identity.

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