Why a rebranding? The creation of the PIO brand
We look different, but our claim has not changed: pioneer communications is now PIO. After 14 years, it was time to rebrand our entire communications agency. In this blog post, we explain the steps we took to create a new corporate brand for ourselves.
We were our own customer during the rebranding process. The challenge for the project team in charge was therefore to step out of the agency's day-to-day work and ask and answer the fundamental questions. Just as we do for our clients. In this way, we laid the foundations for our new corporate brand and prepared the development of our visual identity.
Rebranding example: Our path to PIO
We asked ourselves the following questions at the start of the rebranding process:
What defines our personality: What values, attitudes and characteristics create trust and loyalty?
What benefits we bring: What emotional added value does our brand offer based on its personality?
What we achieve: What objectively verifiable services and competencies make our brand stand out on the market?
What our market environment looks like: What environment does our company operate in? What are the opportunities and risks?
Based on many discussions with employees and the Management Board, we worked out what our purpose, vision and mission, corporate values and USPs are. It was important to us that we involved all colleagues. This enabled us to ensure that the rebranding process was supported by the entire agency.
What is part of a good rebranding strategy?
We were able to gain important insights from all these discussions and workshops. If you were to interpret the communications agency psychologically, we would be a mixture of two types. We see ourselves as explorers because we accompany people who want to make a difference, fearlessly and challengingly. And we see ourselves as a team of heroes who communicate credibly and authentically, offering guidance in a complex world. This helps us to highlight our core competencies:
Conveying messages that provoke reactions and actions
Forming opinions, writing stories and interpreting events
As a communications agency, ask the right questions
Appearing authentic, responsible and progressive
For us, questions are at the beginning of every customer relationship. We want to know what really matters to our clients. “What matters?” has therefore become our guiding question. It lays the foundation for our collaboration with our clients, but also for how we organize ourselves internally at PIO.
How rebranding has changed our brand image
Only after we had worked out our corporate values, core competencies and our guiding question were we ready to tackle the design process. The brainwork paid off: our brand image is consistently derived from our previous considerations; it is the essence of all our research and discussions. Pioneer communications has become PIO. The balance of question and answer is reflected in our creative mission statement: with question marks, exclamation marks, dots and semicolons. It also reflects our goal of getting to the heart of the matter with the question “What matters?". The logo colors cyan, magenta and yellow add up to black and represent the basic colors of modern four-color printing. Our visual identity is also characterized by clarity and openness. This is exactly what characterizes us at PIO.
The rebranding process continues
However, the work was not done with the new corporate design. At every point where people come into contact with our brand, both internally and externally, it now had to be brought to life. That's why all departments were involved in the rebranding process: from the HR department and office equipment to graphics and finance. We changed the logo - in places like the doorbell sign, on our website, in our social media postings and on invoices. We have adapted photos and texts, trained colleagues and changed internal processes. True to our motto “What matters?”, we look for the customers and projects that really suit us. Of course, the rebranding also had an impact on our employer branding and we were able to sharpen our employer brand even further.