When a company comes to us for content marketing strategy and development, they tend to know who they are as a brand—and who they want to become—but also know there’s room to improve their expression, and their content. This was precisely the case with Avante, a B.C.-based manufacturer of point-of-purchase displays geared to turning heads and driving retail sales.
After 30-plus years with the same logo, and around 15 with the same website, Avante CEO Rob Bancoft told us the brand’s visual identity needed “a bit of a reboot.” After having coming in as a new owner to an established business, Rob had reset the business’ mission to deliver “creative partnerships for effective brand communication,” and envisions the refreshed business as innovative and future-minded. So he very much needed a visual identity in keeping with that vision. But as a busy CEO with limited time and a small team, he needed someone to help express that vision, visually.
The Work
Rob and his team were in the process of reconsidering the Avante logo, but they needed help building out a fuller brand identity and visual presence. They were just beginning to envision fresh colours and typography, and a fresh look and feel on their website, social banners, posts, presentations, and beyond … but weren’t quite clear what that could look like.
Fortunately this is exactly what our Brand Content Kits are designed to deliver for clients—all inside of a week.
What is a Forge & Spark Brand Content Kit? Think of it as an expert-guided holistic visual identity refresh presented—along with brand content and templates—in a highly actionable ‘kit.’ It’s like a visual-communication seminar, a brand style guide, and your own brand template pack all rolled into one. The process is led by our fearless Creative Director Lara Kroeker, who walks the client through every step.
Our Approach
Our Brand Content Kit development process is intensive and highly collaborative, requiring just a single—albeit busy—business week from kickoff to finish. No long meetings are required (which clients appreciate), though we do ask them to be around and available to provide feedback in the moment, to keep things moving along.
After a questionnaire exercise to zero in on Avante’s goals and target deliverables, Lara rolled up her sleeves and led two half-day work sessions, kicked off by ultra-focused (yet fun … really!) 45-minute calls: Day 1 to set up the kit and pull together initial options, and Day 2 to fully flesh out the “go ahead” items that would ultimately make up the Brand Kit.
This included confirming how Avante wished to use the 10 Content Credits included in the Brand Content Kit service.
After a couple of follow-up days working to refine Avante’s new visual identity and content assets, it was a thrill to unveil the final results and hand over the Brand Content Kit to the Avante team live on Day 5.
Crafting the Brand Content: Content Credits
When clients purchase a Brand Content Kit service, they receive 10 Content Credits to spend on the development of brand content. This not only helps to ‘test’ out the fresh visual branding on real content assets, but gives our clients content and templates they can use right away.
During the service week, our team asked Avante how they wished to spend their credits. Rob and Miranda opted to create a mockup of a new home page for their website (in advance of developing a new site they wanted to show their designer how the new site should look and feel) and to develop social posts and banners that pulled their social media presence together consistently and with impact.
The Results
For Rob, the real win was in the time he saved. After talking to other branding agencies, and learning that a rebranding process could take months (and possibly tens of thousands of dollars) he expressed relief at the fast, intense turnaround we were able to deliver—on a budget.
And Miranda and the Avante marketing team was delighted with the guidance on how they could use, and evolve, their Brand Content Kit, and how they might apply their fresh brand logos, custom font sets, and new colour palette, along with premium branded templates, curated photos, icons, textures and other visual assets, plus sample content. They particularly appreciated that the Kit was usable in Canva, enabling them to easily create on-brand, consistently impactful, designs and content for their business going forward.
The sample web pages and social posts were a particular hit for everyone—not only because they serve as practical building blocks for the future, but because they allowed the Avante team to see and feel how beautifully their newly minted visual identity expresses the brand’s essence in content.
They’re at work now on a new website using their fresh branding—their development team guided by the mockup we produced together—and their marketing team is actively using and adding to their social content templates to expedite content marketing production.
Why We Love Them
Avante was a dream to work with! They were present, available, and enthusiastic in perfect measure, and it was a true collaborative journey bringing the team’s ideas to life. We can’t wait to see where they take the brand next.
Rob Bancroft, Owner, Avante POP Displays. Photo credit: BDC
