What do you do when you’ve just celebrated your birthday, built a global client base and levelled up your skillset and experience? To most businesses, it would be a time to kick back and wait for years of similar success. Not us.
We knew it was the perfect time to reflect and start planning for the future. Not only had we established ourselves as experts in the digital marketing space, but we’d also experienced exponential growth and understood that we were a different beast to what we were a few years ago. We were stronger, more mature and ready to take on bigger holistic challenges. The Spindogs brand needed to reflect this.
As part of our brand review we identified a need to redefine our vision for Spindogs, our mission, purpose and values, to cement our shifting perspective and reflect our growth. A rebrand is not something we take lightly, and it has been a collaborative project for all of the team.
Using the experience gained from rebranding and repositioning many clients, we naturally followed our trusted process honed from expertise in brand. We held a mirror up to ourselves and were honest about who we were and what direction we wanted Spindogs to go in. But most importantly, we reassessed how we do what we do and what changes we can make that are going to have a positive impact on our clients.
Why the new look?
Essentially, we had outgrown our brand presentation. Our core purpose and tone of voice no longer did justice to who we are, didn’t reflect the years of experience and new skills we had accrued, nor the level of complex and wide-ranging challenges we were overcoming for our clients.
Our former brand no longer represented us. No longer confined to Cardiff or South Wales, we work with partners from a broad range of industries and locations, and we have colleagues across the UK. Our technology is more advanced, and we offer a wider breadth of services than ever before.
So, we’ve been on a journey of redefining who we are, what we want to achieve and what our services mean to our clients.
Involving the team
Our people are at the core of our rebrand. Like any rebranding project we undertake with our clients, we began the process by bringing a team of people together to reevaluate the Spindogs brand and map the strategy for change. This involved running numerous discovery workshops to get under the skin of the brand and establish a set of archetypes and emotions we wanted to convey through visuals, messaging and every touch point of the company.
During these discovery workshops, we set the foundations for how we wanted to be perceived by our team, clients and the rest of the industry. We defined the essence of who we are; our core purpose, value proposition and market positioning compared to our competitors. These discovery workshops also enabled us to confirm our business goals and audience’s needs to ensure that everything we did going forward would benefit Spindogs and our clients.
Gathering external opinions
Working on rebranding projects for our clients is second nature to us. We understand the process and the key elements that ensure it is a success. In the same way that we advocate for our clients to get an outside perspective on their brand (aka, us), we knew we had to do the same when working on the project for ourselves.
While we wanted to control the process as much as possible, we knew from the get-go how important it was to have additional eyes from outside of the business to add an unbiased perspective. We’re so close to the Spindogs brand that we needed third-party views to walk us through our own prejudices and help us cut to the core of what we’re about – much like we do when working with our clients’ brands. It was also crucial that we involve our clients in the process – not in choosing from a beauty parade of logos, but in helping to hold up that mirror and to understand why they trust us and where we could do better.
Don’t be afraid to go in a new direction
We identified early on that the visual brand, while representative of who we were five years ago, was now underselling our capabilities. The ears on our logo had been with us for a long time. We knew they were synonymous with Spindogs and were a big part of our identity. But, we had to take a step back and ask, does a pair of ears really define who we are? The answer is no. We’re so much more than a pair of ears on a logo, which is why we’ve adopted a new visual approach that reflects our three-dimensional thinking; our client-first mentality and commitment to providing solutions and results for them and their audiences.
“We might have lost our ears, but we’re still listening.”
We might have lost our ears, but that doesn’t mean we have stopped listening to our clients and the industry. We still put our clients and their audiences first, and we still take the time to listen and learn from others in the digital sphere.
What does it mean for our clients?
We might have changed how we look but the level and quality of services remain the same. Digital is still our business and is what we do best, day in day out, and we’re still here delivering effective and impactful solutions and sharing our expertise with clients, our peers and the wider industry. We’ve just made a few changes to ensure we reinforce the strong relationships we have with our clients and maintain them for the next 15 years and beyond.
Underpinning the new brand is something that we call ‘three-dimensional thinking’ – introducing the audience as an active third member of the client agency relationship. While always advocates of the client-first mindset, we believe that keeping the audience front of mind strengthens the structure of the relationship, providing a consistent point of reference that ensures our decisions are founded on genuine audience benefit rather than individual opinion or uninformed bias.
‘Full service’ means nothing if delivered in a sequence of independent activities, or you get hung up on channel or platform details. No matter whether clients work with us in a single discipline, or have engaged with us across multiple services, we never work on projects in isolation; technical advantage, marketing performance and brand strength inform our thinking at all times. The really good stuff only happens when you think in three dimensions.
We no longer see ourselves as an agency. We’re your partner and an extension of your team, and we’re with you every step of the way.
So, if you have a challenge, our digital experts are here to interrogate the status quo and find a solution that fits you, your business, and most importantly, your audience.
What’s next on our agenda?
As part of the rebranding process, we have unveiled our new logo and transformed our website to meet the needs of the business and better reflect what we do for our clients. Our new website gives us the platform to communicate who we are, demonstrate our expertise and how we support our audience. But that’s not it from us. We’re not here to stand still – we’re forever learning and growing to become better versions of ourselves. We continue to add to our global client base, tackle even bigger challenges than before and provide unique web solutions that work for our partners.
