Brabners, Brand Transformation
Situation
Brabners is the North West’s leading law firm and has a growing national presence. The marketing team approached us to review its brand narrative and visual identity.
Brabners is a UK top 100 law firm, ranks in The Legal 500 in 22 separate practice areas and 21 Brabners lawyers have been named in the elite “Leading Lawyers” list. Although our research revealed strong name awareness, few audiences understood the sheer scope of Brabners’ service offering or the excellence of its work.
Transformation
We created a clear brand strategy and narrative built on the corporate strategy and detailed audience personas. We positioned Brabners as ‘Commercial Lawyers for Ambitious Business’, and created its purpose as ‘Realising Ambition’ – which helped unify commercial and consumer messaging for the first time. New values, propositions, and a tone of voice cascaded from this purpose. We also sought case studies and developed thought leadership campaigns to evidence the propositions and bring the brand to life.
The visual identity was refined, evolving the logo mark to make it more distinctive and improve performance on digital platforms. A stronger, highly distinctive colour system was created around Brabners Bronze and Brabners Blue to cut through the ubiquitous competitor palettes. Fonts were improved, with ITC Caslon combined with Akkurat to pair statesman-like elegance with contemporary Swiss pragmatism. And a bespoke, unique grid-system was created that flowed across digital and print platforms.
We then developed campaigns based on Realising Ambitions for Brabners’ lead sectors. We also celebrated its second centenary through the ‘200 years of Ambition’ campaign.
Growth
Our work for Brabners has impacted every aspect of its business.
Like for like revenues in the first financial year following our work grew to £29.2m and fee income grew across all core service areas.
