How to build a strong corporate brand that corporate businesses love
What makes a corporate brand successful: a Penguin Learning case study
We want to show you how corporate brands can be fresh, dynamic and full of personality, successfully attracting and engaging with business clients in the corporate world.
Corporate brands can often come across as austere, straight-laced and stiff, but we want to offer an alternative; that you can be more human as a corporate brand and still win clients and projects.
We’re going to use Penguin Learning for this case study. We worked with brothers Paul and Phil to refresh their brand and provide website design to get them set up on Squarespace, and this is what Paul said afterwards:
Rachael & Simon challenged our thinking about our website, brand & tone of voice - what we have now is nothing like what we envisaged, but is a 1,000 times better than anything we could have hoped for. Our clients love our new look that reflects the people that work there. I have no hesitation in recommending them and we will do more work with them again in the future.
Here’s what we’ll be covering when looking at a strong corporate brand:
Be more human & less data-driven
Develop your messaging for humans, not robots
Reflect the people in your business
Mirror your ideal corporate clients
Inject personality & don’t be so corporate
Explore website design
If you’d like to explore the ins and out of simple, beautiful & robust website design for your business, previous series or different aspects of website marketing, we’ve collated all our website design blogs for you.
Website design by Wildings
We are a brand studio based in Torquay, South Devon, offering branding, website design & brand video to creative businesses across the UK - find out more about our website design services.
1. Be more human & less data-driven
One of the big drivers for Paul at Penguin Learning was a desire to be more human and pull away from the data-driven environment.
Corporate brands tend to focus heavily on numbers and statistics (which is essential, demonstrating how they deliver Return on Investment (ROI) for clients). However, it can result in quite a cold, emotionless experience for customers.
People still make decisions based on (a) emotional-triggers and (b) trust, whether you are in the corporate world or on Etsy. We’re not saying numbers don’t matter, but building rapport and trust must come first.
Numbers, stats and ROI can come second to back up the claims you make as a brand, but should not overpower the first critical step: create resonance with your ideal clients on a human and emotional level.
The key way we helped Penguin Learning achieve this was through re-centring its branding or corporate visual identity on its corporate clients; not the brand names, but the key decision-makers that they came into contact on a day-to-day basis.
We helped them define and visualise those individuals through personas or avatars so that humans were always in focus.
When you define the people you want to work with, you can identity the things that really matter to them (problems or desirable outcomes); use the language that they understand; as well as identifying new potential clients who could be a good fit.
Here are the after versus before screenshots of the website:
2. Develop your messaging for humans, not robots
When brands are overly-corporate, they tend to sound robotic and cold-hearted, which completely misses the people that drive corporate businesses.
Your brand messaging is a key way in which you demonstrate a variety of key things about your business:
What’s important to your business, such as your values
What it’s like to work with you
The key ways you bring value to your clients
Messaging is a key component that works alongside the visuals in your branding.
When corporate brands use too much corporate or technical jargon in their messaging on their websites or marketing materials, it makes them less easy to relate to.
Decision-makers are not always necessarily subject or technical experts, and when we assume people know what industry-specific words mean or use management-speak, we run the risk of alienating them.
Branding and website are on the front-line of a business’ marketing, so need to speak to a set of people who have a broad awareness of an issue, rather than the specific details (that’s your job!).
Using big words or business-speak in marketing doesn’t make us more impressive, it puts people in a defensive position. It forces them to translate the true meaning of what you are saying or puts them off as it’s just not obvious how you can solve their problems.
Finding ways to explain complicated matters in a simple, straight-forward way is not a sign of weakness; it’s a strength as you increase the chance of resonating with a key decision-maker. The technical details and intricacies should come later.
We embedded clear handrails within Penguin Learning’s branding guidelines to help them build strong, consistent brand messaging that would attract, not alienate potential clients.
3. Reflect the people in your business
When we first sat down with Paul, he conveyed a desire to match the personality of the Penguin Learning brand offline and online.
Clients had fed back his team was full of ‘nice human beings’, and they wanted to reflect that in their website and online.
The closer you can align your online or digital brand with the experience that clients have with you in person, the greater the overall impact you have as a brand.
The reality with many corporate businesses is that they are full of passionate people who want to make a difference in the world. However, their appearance doesn’t necessarily indicate that - the traditional blue and grey colours; the cringey stick-person stock images; or endless dry statistics and factual material.
Imagery is a great way to develop the personality of a corporate brand, so we worked with Paul and Penguin Learning to assemble an image bank of fresh, attractive people photography.
At the time, Penguin Learning wasn’t in a position to commission brand photography (which is the ideal), because of the COVID-19 pandemic and its highly dispersed team. Instead, we used royalty-free images from Unsplash to capture the feel of their dynamic team of consultants and associates.
With a bit of care and rummaging around, you can compile a clutch of highly coherent images from royalty-free sites that hang together, are not overly-staged or corny. Exploring images from one specific photographer is a good way to do this for consistency, which is what a brand photographer does par excellence - completely tailored to your aesthetic, context and vibe.
4. Mirror your ideal corporate clients
As we’ve mentioned in past blogs, the more easily potential clients can relate to your brand, the more likely they will be to work with you.
Note again, it is about people first here, not trying to come across as the most corporate brand. The best corporate brands are the most people-focussed ones.
With this in mind, we worked with Paul and Penguin in a couple of key ways:
(a) We defined the key people who made decisions with clients
(b) We reflected that diversity in their branding and website design
Penguin Learning worked with a whole variety of people in its consultancy projects, not just middle-aged men in suits in the boardroom, which is what we often think of with corporate businesses.
As a brand, Penguin Learning works with women, individuals from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds, as well as brands who have a more relaxed style or dress code.
Penguin Learning was keen to attract further clients in sectors like fintech (financial technology) or working in Software as a Service (SAAS), which tend to lead the way with modern, creative and flexible approaches to their culture, value and workplaces.
Within Penguin Learning’s brand imagery, we worked hard to reflect the kinds of people who you’d typically see in a given project and represented them on the Penguin Learning website.
Again, the key principle here is if someone can see him or herself in your brand, the more likely they will resonate with you and the more likely they will engage or buy from you.
5. Inject personality & don’t be so corporate
It’s all right to demonstrate personality as a corporate brand - it’s not unprofessional or overly-familiar.
This comes back to the points we have been developing so far.
People are the one that make decisions in businesses that you want to work with, so treat them like humans:
Speak to them in a way that doesn’t require them to get a degree in order to understand you.
Show them images that they can relate to and are attractive, rather than assault their attention-span with a spew of soulless words or statistics.
One of the ways that we helped Penguin Learning develop its corporate brand personality further was by introducing dynamic elements on its website.
We used Squarespace as its Content Management System (CMS) and then added custom code and Javascript to develop some on-screen animations.
The moving effects you see cannot be implemented out of the box with a standard Squarespace template. We put in a lot of code to develop the animations that give the site movement and interest.
Working alongside the images, these animations help lift the impact of the website by allowing it to jump out and catch the attention of a visitor.
The unexpected, fun nature of the custom animations reflects part of the personality of Penguin Learning as a business, wanting to help corporate business clients get amazing results by doing things in different and creative ways, unlocking unexpected progress.
The animations on the homepage deliver a sense of unlocking potential through the Tetris-style grid of blocks and the bouncing call offers a sense of shaking things up to create a new order. On the How we work page there are spotlights and a revolving wheel, again which all reinforce the Penguin Learning approach as a brand.
If you’re looking to redevelop your brand and work in the corporate sector with corporate businesses, this should give you a good foundation. Also, we’d love to hear from any of your thoughts or reflections in the comments below, or else head over to Instagram to join the conversation and share your opinion.
