Tag: northern ireland

BeyondHR – Brand identity

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BeyondHR focus on a relationships based approach to Human Resources, their headquarters are based in Ballymena, Northern Ireland, with another office based in Glasgow, Scotland. Previously named Personnel and Training Services (PTS), our rebranding project was undertaken to reposition the business within the market.

Their name PTS, was out-dated for the marketplace, we took this opportunity to rename, to allow the company to engage with its audiences in today’s world. Starting wide, we went through over 50 names each with reasoning on why the name was relevant. We then refined, short-listing down to seven.

The chosen name ‘BeyondHR’ was a fantastic metaphor for the business with lots of branding potential.

Understanding the Brand

We looked at the industry landscape and noticed the majority were very corporate, and didn’t seem very approachable for a business which dealt with people. A lot of the logos didn’t give you much of a hint of what they do. We seen this as one of the challenges we had for BeyondHR, as we needed the business to look approachable, friendly and tell you what they do.

Our goal within the BeyondHR rebranding was to create a trustworthy brand, which kept inline with their core values of focusing on relationship.

Brand Audit – Brief

To create a brand identity for BeyondHR incorporating the new name with a clever, friendly visual direction. The new identity would become the face for the brand and reflect the core values of BeyondHR. The brand will position the business as the go to HR company when you need them the most. The brand allows flexibility to evolve over time. BeyondHR wanted to reach out to smaller businesses, as they want to make Human Resources more approachable.

Like many brands we create at Kaizen Brand Evolution we have created a branding system which makes it simple for anyone in the business to be able to use. We show the client how the brand works and how it can be utilised. BeyondHR’s brand was developed from research we gathered from multiple sources to make sure we understood the industry we are designing for. We took elements from our research and we created three independent brand concepts that fully reflected the marketplace BeyondHR operate in. Each had a unique value proposition so BeyondHR could visualise their brand potential, after refinement of the chosen brand concept, we are rolling this out across a range of deliverables both offline and across digital media.

The Logo Build

The logo type was created using elements ‘BeyondHR’ + ‘Support’ + ‘Eye’ + ‘People’. From this we built a clever device, which houses a person in the negative space of the ‘O’. This represents that BeyondHR are people centric in everything that it does. We wanted people to smile when they discover the person in the logo, and hopefully smile when they engage with BeyondHR. The device will be used throughout the branding system from housing different icons depending on the sub-brands/services they offer.

Each element of the brand has been thoroughly looked at, from brand campaigns to lanyards to how the coffee mugs would look like.

We introduced a vibrant colour palette to use against a contrasting navy, the colours used per sub-brand each have their purpose in the brand, the red is used as it shows leadership and suggests stability; the teal is used as it’s more softer for training purposes and represents knowledge; the yellow is used as its friendly and approachable, perfect for recruiting; and finally the green is associated with healing and protection.

Brand Language

We created the approachable brand, we needed a tagline which helps define what BeyondHR does as the brand language is just as important as the visual identity. “We’re People People”.

The power of Snapchat

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Snapchat is one of the most powerful ways of communicating today, short and sweet bursts of messages between you and a friend on your phone that disappear before you have a chance to react, it’s the fast-paced engagement and the exchange of information keeping us hooked. From Snapchat’s origin in quick fire picture exchange, its has significantly evolved offering text exchange between users, highly interactive and engaging video filters, story telling video diaries, worldwide event coverage and most prominent – Brand advertising. Just as the evolution of social media channels like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, Snapchat has quickly overruled as the leader in brand awareness. The user interaction analytics secure Snapchat as the most used social media platform and with this information comes a responsibility as a business to jump on board and get your brand out there.

There are many tiers of Snapchat advertising that can be easily achieved at any business level and what makes it better is Snapchat advertising is surprisingly affordable. For instance, our first use of Snapchat advertising at Kaizen brand Evolution was a simple Geofilter (interactive branding watermark over the top of the live feed camera) at Culture Night Belfast 2016. For this, we simply created a mobile sized, branded template, which could be used on the night of the event. The brilliant thing about Snapchat is that you set your location; timings and radius reach to pinpoint exactly where you want the Snapchat Geofilter to appear. What an unbelievably personal, in the moment and engaging form of advertising. It was so exciting seeing people interact and use our own Kaizen Brand Evolution filter on the night, and it appeared on your selections just after the main Snapchat filters. Following the interactions and success of the evening at Belfast Culture Night 2016, we reviewed the analytics of our simple Geofilter design and the stats were staggering. Let me put this into perspective, we set the location radius to an area of Belfast about the size of a football stadium, we had it running on Snapchat for 6hours and we told maybe 100 people who came to our stall at Belfast Culture Night 2016 about its existence and how we were testing the new medium. Our analytics report on user engagement was staggering: We had 17.3k views of our filter and 346 uses.

This only sets to prove my point on how powerful Snapchat is as a brand awareness tool. Following our first use of Snapchat we have been providing the branding service for our clients. Most notably for Boojum and their Halloween campaign. The premise of the campaign was to draw customers to each of the 3 locations of Boojum restaurants in Belfast City Centre. We created and designed 3 separate Snapchat filter designs for Boojum to use across their Great Victoria Street, Chichester Street and Botanic Avenue sites. Each design is different and alongside a Facebook and Twitter post we encourage customers to attend each Boojum location to essentially ‘catch ‘em all’ (not to paraphrase the Pokemon Go craze, but you get my point). There are two key points to this campaign, brand awareness, and brand engagement. Alongside the fantastic Halloween themed design the plans to involve their customers and locations will certainly prove successful. This forward thinking brand medium provides a new platform for brands to showcase their business in a new way, and the results speak for themselves. If we can achieve 17.3k views with hardly any marketing or build up, imagine the possibilities for your brand.

We now specialise in the design, creation, and customisation of Snapchat Geofilters and advertising. If you believe in your business and would like some design intervention online, engaging and interacting with more potential customers that ever, get in touch and we’ll be happy to set up a meeting.