A brand that’s true.
No matter how strong or timeless your brand is, if it’s out of step with the day-to-day reality of your business, it might be time for a makeover. That’s why, after eight years of growth and evolution, we spent the winter reevaluating what was working—and what wasn’t—for our own website and brand identity.
So, for this newsletter, we’re diving into a case study on our own brand refresh. As with all of our clients, we’ve focused on “holding up a mirror” to our business and identifying opportunities for differentiation—truly, a never-ending process for any successful, evolving company.
BRAND IDENTITY
Some brands refresh their logos every few years. In our case, we felt the quirky right brain icon still accurately represents our approach and personality. On the other hand, our previous tagline—“establishing artisans as influencers”—no longer captured the whole of what we do as a business. While entrepreneurs and artisans are still a significant part of our client base, we’ve also recently worked on projects for such hospitality leaders as Fairmont, Kimpton and Virgin Hotels. In turn, we refocused on a message that better articulates our services:
DEFINING OUR AUDIENCE
While our previous in-house experience at restaurant groups has shaped our professional network and approach to brand storytelling, we’ve also grown a client base outside the F&B and hotel sectors. After looking at recent projects that felt like an unusually good fit, we settled on four core audiences: Hospitality, Lifestyle + Wellness, Food + Beverage, Design + Architecture. By highlighting case studies in each of these industries on our homepage, we hope to more clearly identify our industries of expertise.
SELF-KNOWLEDGE + TRANSPARENCY
One of the most powerful tools in evolving our business has been listening to client feedback—and in particular, what surprised or delighted our clients about the way we handled each project. In turn, finding a better way to communicate these distinguishing traits to prospective clients became a priority for our website redesign, resulting in a dedicated “approach” page. By setting clear expectations for why and how we do what we do, we’ve dramatically increased the likelihood of attracting our ideal clients.
THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
Over the past few years, we’ve been fortunate to be featured as category “experts” in publications, on podcasts or for public speaking engagements. These opportunities and conversations have helped us realize that we have something (actually, quite a few things!) to say about the way branding and creative services should be approached. In turn, we’ve leveraged our own website and social channels to craft an ongoing series of blog posts that speak to specialized topics in our industry. As we’ve learned, this content not only boosts SEO, but also helps prospective clients get a sense of our creative process.
There are countless other aspects of our brand refresh that we could highlight and analyze—from choosing photography to feature, to rewriting our bios (oh, so many rewrites!), to highlighting new services that have become a larger part of our work. Yet the primary takeaway, for us, is the belief that staying true to who you are and how your business operates is the best strategy for any brand.
If you’ve made it this far, thank you for checking out our new website! And more importantly, thank you for being an ongoing supporter of Cognoscenti Creative. We look forward to continuing these brand-evolving, strategic conversations with many of you in the months and years to come.
IN THE NEWS
Cognoscenti Creative Brands Scrappy Sandwich Shop, Bodega Denver
The Denver Egotist
“To realize the brand—and the dynamism and warmth of his vision—Blauvelt partnered with the Denver-based, boutique creative studio Cognoscenti Creative. Pulling from the historic iconography of both iconic NYC bodegas and the mom-and-pop retail culture of Sunnyside, the resulting brand identity conveys an inviting familiarity, with one foot in retro signage and another in the modern, innovative world of Blauvelt’s culinary creations.”