BBL - Making events live

From BBLand to Brand

Posted by Ben Leighton on 17/2/11

Wow, I’m sure many of you have been through re-brands and re-working out of date websites to bring them up to 2011. What an experience, from a launch date of January to 28th February we certainly bit off more than we thought and spent a lot of time on the process trying to get it right. I hope you like the results!

At the beginning of the process we engaged local media company in Bath, Marcom – who won us over with an impressive pitch and presentation, it certainly helped in the long and short term that they were local so we could get together to brainstorm whenever possible.

After a few meetings of ‘discovery’ to find out who we were and what we wanted our message to be, we found ourselves at a cross roads as we have a strong creative element to our work but also a formidable logistics and delivery reputation that has seen us deliver many fantastic events over the years. We also have a strong relationship with I.T sector clients and deliver a lot of work in that field. Thus, do we want to focus purely at I.T or at some of the many other industries we have worked in and represented?

So are we a ‘creative’ agency or a ‘delivery’ agency? Going down this route we found ourselves not wanting to pigeon hole ourselves and certainly felt that we had a strong creative element in the company but had maybe just not promoted or shown it enough in the market place. Working for many I.T companies, we have strong confidentiality contracts and cannot always sing from the top of the hills, the work for companies we are delivering for.

So, after much soul searching we had to go back to the drawing board as we want to show off our creativity rather than just play to one of our strengths. This pushed us back in time further as the logos and web design we had so far were consigned to history.

We pushed on with a new style, not wanting to show the same old ‘auditorium shots’, ‘gala dinner’ bathed in red light etc, we wanted a homepage which took the elements of events and brought them together in a new way to provoke thought and hopefully interest, for this we engaged local artist Victoria Rose who’s previous work we knew and liked. Victoria created the illustration you now see on the homepage and Marcom brought a new logo to the table as well as merging the ‘bbl’ element into various words we felt described us, we felt it quirky, fun and another way of differing ourselves.

From here we felt we had what we wanted and a base from which to build the new site and brand. As we now look at the finished article we are very happy with the results, we look forward to our present and future clients seeing our message and creativity a little clearer.