Brand Identity Case Study: Parklife Communications

Client Company—Parklife Communications, Hillsborough, NC

Vital Signs:  The company is two years old, led by a husband-and-wife team of veteran corporate marketers.  Parklife provides marketing consultation and content for both digital and collateral materials.  Clients include companies in business-to-business consulting and services, legal, green building, entertainment, and fine arts.  Parklife has a heavy emphasis on the cutting-edge tactics and tools in blogs and social media.

Needs—In a classic “cobbler’s children with no shoes” scenario, Parklife has built its business over the last two years without taking time to brand itself. The company needed a representative logo and brand mark, along with color and font schemes suitable for everything from business cards to social media avatars.

Trig’s Branding Approach—First step, 3C analysis, taking a holistic look at the company, its representative clients, and its competitors.  After capturing the essence of Parklife and its people, seeing the types of clients it targets, and positioning the company within its competitive landscape, Trig facilitated several ideation sessions with the principals, leading to multiple concept iterations.

During the first ideation session, Trig assembled a list of adjectives to describe the Parklife brand: progressive, kinetic, modern, playful, fun, shrewd, business-savvy, anti-corporate, innovative, and collaborative.  Our consulting team then matched up these adjectives with fonts that reflected the attributes described, giving the Parklife team multiple options.

During the second ideation session, the Trig team probed Parklife’s penchant for color. We received some great guidance here, as the Parklife team had some well-defined opinions. We were told to avoid anything too primary and corporate, but to avoid being too trendy. The color scheme needed to be modern, but with a classic feel.

After refining Parklife’s color preferences, our design team set to work on a brand mark that would serve as an iconic representation of the company in both digital and collateral-based marketing.  An early idea that clearly resonated with the Trig team and the Parklife team was the idea of turning certain letters in the name of the company into punctuation mark-like images. After multiple iterations, we settled on the truly iconic rendering of Parklife with the A and E reflective of quotation marks.  We selected the A mark for the stand alone brand mark for use in applications such as social media avatars.

Results—The results of this exercise were inspiring for the Trig team, since we enjoyed a rare opportunity to do brand work for a service company outside of our normal industry space in hardware, tools, and medical devices.  You can see the multiple renderings and iterations that got us to the final products on our case study page.



Evaluating Your New Product Idea

By Ty Hagler

One of my favorite conversations starts with the statement, ‘So I’ve got this idea.’ As an innovation consultant and industrial designer by training, these words spark an engaging discussion that gives me a chance to not only share my expertise, but also to learn something new about my field. When someone forms an idea for a new product, there is a tangible thrill and excitement that I find infectious, and I always welcome the discussion.

Having recently spoken with several inventors, pre-funded start-up ventures, and generally creative people, it has struck me that many of the conversations start with a request for validation of their ideas, but ends up with a discussion of process. The discipline of industrial design teaches that the first iteration of an idea is rarely the best idea. 

This concept may seem counter-intuitive, but the merits of an idea depend on the customer’s problem the idea is trying to solve:

• Is this problem a real point of pain or frustration for a segment of the population? 
• How large is that population segment?
• Is the pain or frustration strong enough that people are willing to purchase a solution?
• What is the process that customers follow to seek out a solution to this problem?

Answering these questions is a critical part of the due diligence that will be required of any investment in your idea, whether you’re pursuing a license deal or full commercialization. A number of research tools help us find the answers to these questions, including customer mapping and concept validation studies. Ultimately, these tools all fall back on the overall concept of Kenichi Ohmae’s 3C Model—the corporation, the customer, and the competitors.

While the aforementioned questions address the customer aspect of the 3C Model, people with ideas must also examine their competitive landscape. When we engage in this type of work, the odds are highly likely that someone else has observed this problem and launched his own solution. How many competitor or substitute solutions currently exist to address that same pain point?  It certainly makes sense to know what the patent landscape looks like for your particular domain.

In my conversations with investors, be they venture capital firms, angels, or otherwise, I find that their initial focus is on “who” versus “what.” That is, investors focus their first-pass screening criteria on the corporation aspect of the 3C Analysis, because this typically overlooked by start-ups. Investors are just as interested in placing their bets behind a talented leadership team that is committed to their vision as they are in the details of a specific business opportunity. Launching a product takes an enormous amount of energy, and, to be successful, it ultimately takes a team of tireless, talented people. Of the many decisions you face when pursuing your idea, your ability and willingness to organize a team around your vision should have the greatest impact on the decision to license or commercialize.

As you evaluate how to best develop your idea, you should assess your capabilities at the very beginning of the process.  Full commercialization takes a lot of fortitude, determination, and the ability to recruit the right mix of talent to clear the initial hurdles, whereas inventors who want to stick to what they do best—inventing—may choose the patent-and-license route. Regardless of the path you choose to follow, the process of bringing an idea to life is a skill to be developed and you will find there is a whole ecosystem to support you in your creative contributions to the economy.  

Branding to Reach New Heights: Thought Leader Select Engages Trig Innovation to Kick-start a New Generation of Innovation--Part One

As part of a corporate re-branding initiative that included a revamp of its corporate website, Thought Leader Select engaged Trig Innovation to revisit their corporate logo.  Through Trig’s consultative process, the two parties spoke in great depth about what Thought Leader Select stands for as a research and consulting partner to the biopharmaceutical industry, how they are different from their competitors, and the customers they serve.

Thought Leader Select understood that brand elements such as logos create unique icons that become shorthand for all the positive and negative associations experienced by the customer with that company.  Logos become meaningful as file folders of the minds of customers—they store their brand experiences mentally, using the logo as an instantaneous trigger to recall memories, both good and bad. Thus, icons are a powerful shortcut past language to a deeper emotional connection.  Properly designed logos pack a lot of meaning into a visual shortcut

The first stage was to discuss the brand strategy in terms of a 3C (company, customers, competitors) analysis and determine how that strategy would be expressed in the visual assets.  Thought Leader Select’s marketing team had already done a great job understanding their customers and competitors, through its recent completion of a client feedback survey and exhaustive competitive landscape research, and has developed a strong awareness and appreciation for the people in its own workforce and their respective skills and experiences (the company has doubled its number of employees in the last two years).

Comments from one of Thought Leader Select’s employees, a research manager named Rhonda Napier, stood out in particular during discussions.  The fierce pride within the company came out with comments like “Doctors aren’t a search term. They deserve to be honored and not reduced to a number or data set.”  Thought Leader Select’s employees exemplified the company’s commitment to its core service—identifying and profiling medical experts for collaborative work on new medications—and the industries it serves (healthcare and biopharmaceuticals).  “We respectfully connect companies with the doctors they need to advise them on medical and clinical issues as they bring new medicines to market—the right people for the right reasons,” stated Kristen Smithwick, a vice president at the firm. “We believe that our objective, validated methodology opens up opportunities for more physicians and health care providers to provide their expertise pharma and medical device companies in the ultimate service of public health. “

When asked what brands would inspire the new direction of the company brand, principals at Thought Leader Select loved the modern, clean look of pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer and Eli Lilly, consulting companies such as McKinsey, Bain, and even some art museums such as the Guggenheim and the Museum of Modern Art.  Trig Innovation had to strike a balance in the visual assets’ appeal to both pharma and the medical community.  Previous brand iterations utilized color references for scrubs, white spaces, and a general sense of antiseptic sterility.  After some thoughtful discussion, the antiseptic scrub colors were less emphasized, though the palette couldn’t stray too far away. Trig drew from the bold, dynamic presence of advertising agencies while establishing the brand as a trusted resource that can overcome skepticism.  And, just as importantly, Trig team had to accomplish these goals in a way that amplified the humanity of the highly trained people that assess the research data with a very hands-on process.