Brand Strategy & Identity for Legal Sector Client

The Spirant Group is a global group of businesses operating in the legal, technology and medical sectors across the UK, Australia and the US. Spirant came to us originally as Rhea Group, with a number of different businesses/brands that had a range of very disjointed identities. They wanted the overall brand style to encapsulate the top level ethos of the group whilst still allowing each of the business units to have a sub-brand which reflected their own unique personality. An added factor was that even within some of the sub-brands there was a need for regionalisation to cater for the different tastes of contrasting markets like the UK and Australia.

The initial requirements included looking at the brand strategy, defining the company’s purpose in the marketplace and exploring how best to communicate with their customers and make an emotional connection. Additionally, they wanted their brand structure to be flexible enough to suit any future changes such as additional sub-brands being added to the group. As a business their success was intrinsically based on the expertise of their team – so a key requirement was to ensure the key personnel were consulted and involved in the brand development process.

The second part of the brief was to build the branding elements based on the findings from the branding strategy and incorporate these into one all encompassing brand guidelines document. As part of the roll out of the brand the identity needed to be applied to all marketing collateral including stationery, presentations, social channels and, last but not least, a suite of websites for the overall group and four sub-brands, plus a regional variation for Australia.

A reformer brand to shake up the legal sector

The initial phase of the project involved discovery sessions with the CEO and each of the business unit managers. We then led a series of brand strategy workshops in which we explored the brand archetype for the group. As bringing the team along with the process was so vital we ensured that all key personnel were involved in each session. The overwhelming conclusion was that the business was a Reformer brand, with the mission to shake up the old-fashioned legal sector.

Our next challenge was to conduct a naming exercise in which we explored new names and URLs for the overall group and the four sub-brands. The new names were coupled with a unified strapline ‘Your future is our business’ which came together during the discovery process.

Following on from this we produced a suite of logos for the group with a consistent brand style and tone of voice piece to reflect the reformer brand. The branding was then applied across all marketing collateral and a family of websites was developed – all with the same group look and feel, but reflecting the individual nature of each sub-brand in the colours and imagery.