No, but who are you really?

It’s the dreaded question: a trigger of eye rolls, existential crises, a session with your therapist or, in our case, a brand workshop.

You may have noticed recently that we decided to put our money where our mouth is and refreshed the Robot Food brand. A new website (thank you Hungry Sandwich Club), new presentation decks, new illustration style, font, colour, tone and positioning – the works. So, how does a branding agency decide it’s time for a change?

It starts with everyone calling you a packaging design agency and ends with that bloody question. Who are you? Really.

Work that speaks for itself

It’s a common misconception that your brand is your product, or even your logo. They’re important parts of it but some very smart branding person once said that, actually, your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room. It’s how every element is interpreted by your audience – “the customer’s gut feeling about you” – or so says Marty Neumeier (another smart branding person).

Our gut feel was that our brand wasn’t reflecting the agency we’d become. We’d grown, had big ambitions to double that growth and were facing the same dilemma so many of our clients come to us with – how to keep growing while staying true to who you are. Thankfully, we had some experience in this area.

In an Oprah-esque moment we asked ourselves: “Do we know who we are or do we know who we were?”. Much like people, brands change. We have the fundamentals that make us, us, but don’t stay the dramatic teen with a main character complex we once were. Thank god. Growth isn’t just seen on spreadsheets. For us, it was new team faces, new clients with new ways of thinking in new sectors that demanded new approaches. And existing team faces that pushed themselves to learn new skills too.

So who were/are we?

People not robots

You buy creative from people. And while our priority is always to hero the work, this refresh needed to bring in the voices and brains behind Robot Food to add the depth we were after. Things like new typefaces brought volume to our conversational tone, adding little details to help with the likes of emphasis and inflection (the writers amongst us loved that). And creating an illustration style to help us feel just as playful and animated in decks or online as we are IRL (the GIF fans amongst us loved that even more). It’s these elements, remember, that stoke gut feel.

‘Bold and shouty’ became ‘simplified and amplified’ to reflect a more insightful, creative branding agency. One with a common sense perspective and real people behind it creating work that speaks for itself. At least, if that’s what people say about us – we’ll take it.

How do YOU know when it’s time for the question?

Another tricky one. But hopefully now one you feel equipped to answer before the existential crisis kicks in. Maybe you aren’t quite hearing back what you’re putting out there. Or maybe you’ve hit a growth spurt but are still coming across a little gangly and awkward. Maybe you just feel a bit stuck. If these sound familiar, it’s time to ask. Change is daunting but don’t let it be debilitating.

Tell us, who are you?