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How To: Communicate your brand through your office

Your brand goes way beyond your logo and typeface. A brand defines your business, by giving it a purpose and identity, as well as a unique personality that evokes an emotional connection with anyone who comes into contact with it. Understanding how your office can be your brands biggest ambassador is a process our creative team works closely alongside our clients to achieve during their office design journey.

Your brand is essentially the feeling provoked by your business on the people connecting with it,  be it your staff, your customers or your competitors.

Your workplace is where your business comes to life, and is therefore where your brand comes to life. Integrating your brand into your office design, allows the space to communicate and reinforce who you are. Providing visitors with a true representation of your identity, purpose and personality – from the minute they enter the space, to the minute they leave it.

We make it our business to know your business, which allows us to get under the skin of your brand and help you to communicate your company philosophy effectively to all your visitors. This approach also helps businesses to influence employee behaviours, as well as attract and retain the best talent. Taking any potential and existing employees / clients on a journey that truly reflects who you are, is something that is now more important than ever.

Below are our 4 steps towards creating a workplace that communicates your brand, with examples of how we have helped our clients achieve this:

Your Identity

Your brand identity is made up of what you do and say, your values and how you promote your product. Essentially your brand identity is the personality of your business.

For Bumble, integrating their brand was vital to the design process. Their playful, fun-loving and unique personality needed to be present throughout the entire space, ensuring that an emotional connection was evoked by all visitors.

Dthree worked closely with the Bumble team to create an inviting, brand led space.  When working with a business who have such a recognisable and influential brand, it is important to get the balance right, to ensure the space creates impact, without going overboard.

As soon as you enter the Bumble space, you are greeted with a large yellow feature wall and bright neon logo, providing all visitors with a sense of arrival the second they walk through the door. Brand inspired features throughout, such as the yellow phone booth and flower detail, communicate their unqiue personality whilst reinforcing their female-focused business concept.

The bold colour scheme and ‘hive’ logo, is echoed throughout the space, with even the most subtle of details packing a punch, such as the yellow glazing track, bespoke shelving and colourful furnishing details.

Your Purpose

Your brand purpose is essentially the reason for your business’ existence (beyond making money). It’s important to not confuse this with a ‘brand promise’. A brand promise may give the buyer an idea of what to expect from the product or service, but the brand purpose goes way beyond that. Purpose-led brands build stronger connections with all who come into contact with the business. It is how you build lasting relationships with your clients, and also how you keep your employees engaged and committed.

The purpose for leading mental health charity, Young Minds, is to ‘create a world where no young person feels alone with their mental health and that all young people get the support and help they need’. To ensure their office supported this, Dthree worked closely with the team, to design a space that not only celebrated what they do, but creates a sense of community and brings people together. At the heart of the office is their bright, airy and open plan breakout space, that not only hosts their kitchen facilities but also provides a variety of seating options to encourage collaboration and togetherness for all using it.

One of the key features that really helps to draw people into the space and reinforce their purpose, is the large wall motif, “You Are Not Alone.” This was designed in collaboration with Young Mind’s activists to get the voices of the young people heard. The messages within the creation are all personal from the activists themselves.

User Experience

Every business has the ability to create a positive experience through the journey it takes their customers on. Some of the most well-known brands today create experiences that are not only memorable, but inspirational, and evoke feelings of happiness and satisfaction in both prospective and existing customers.

Like your product, your workspace also has the ability to create a positive experience for anyone who enters it.

For Red Bull it was essential that the experience of walking the space reflected who they are – but they are so much more than just the can of Red Bull that initially springs to mind. The ethos of the business as a whole, which includes investing and supporting truly ambitious and remarkable people, bringing people together and supporting charities, needed to come through.

The entire Dthree project team spent time in the Red Bull office, working across different parts of the building to observe and understand first-hand, the genuine Red Bull feeling, so that this could be reciprocated throughout the design. The challenge of this, led to some cleaver design features which really imprint Red Bull on the subconscious throughout the space. When entering the space, visitors get a subtle view of the working areas through a slatted timber design. The significance? It’s all based on the rhombus image on a Red Bull can

Culturally the various strings of Red Bull’s bow had never been within one building before, let alone across two working floors. The challenge and significance of this meant the space had to create a sense of togetherness to reinforce the brands globally loved ethos of ‘bringing people together,’ whilst also accommodating the different nuances within the teams. As a solution, Dthree focused on adaptability and flexibility throughout the space. Creating a connected user experience through areas that can be opened up with folding walls, fabric acoustics, and carefully selected product specifications.  This created a wide variety of collaborative and innovative spaces, which vary in size, facilities and style – essentially mirroring the dynamic nature of the business and its many user experiences around the world.

The Aesthetics

Your brand and office aesthetics should feel connected. Many of our clients pre-refurbished offices are extremely disjointed from their brand, and could actually be the home to another business entirely. The overall look and feel of your office space speaks volumes to your employees, clients and competitors.  It can hold huge significance in capturing and communicating your business’s unique purpose, personality, and people.

Methods deliver technical solutions to their customers, and approached Dthree to help them create a workspace which not only reinforced this, but also supported the different working needs of their employees.

Their design brief balanced the technical and functional requirements of the business, with emphasis on elevating their culture and overall employee experience. Well being and sustainability were key components throughout the process.

With intricate planning of the space, and the inclusion of a personal design identity throughout, this developed into an environment that encourages flexible working, collaboration and social interaction, whilst having a professional yet bespoke aesthetic entirely unique to Methods brand and purpose.

The space was created with a variety of functional areas, each with their own bespoke details such as the patterned acoustic paneling, the large library space with personal desktop lighting control, and bespoke joinery all to promote certain behaviors, or way of working, whilst balancing the functional practicalities.

If you are looking to improve your workspace so that it communicates your individual brand and purpose – Send us an email or give us a call, we would love to hear from you!