Brand is influence

🕐 4 min read

Think of the power of brands. You can apply this to your job, your workplace, your team. Establish an identity for everything.

Why does branding at work matter?

Think of the power of brands. Especially with design, think of how emotive and influential brands can be. You can apply this to your job, your workplace, your team.

How often do you refer to a piece of work with some obscure internal name? Give it an identity instead! As a creative, establish an identity and brand.

We are crazy busy humans with a lot of information to absorb. How do you cut through the noise and ensure your colleagues understand? How often have you pushed a program or event or concept or project only for people to say I didn't know about that or even I didn't realise what it was.

Brand all the things

Branding things is fun, especially for creatives. Here are some examples I've created:

REAio & Inventorship (nee Hack Day)

When we started hackathons at REA in 2010 they started out as Hack Day: a day and a half to work on whatever you want. However this quickly become untenable as singular Hack Day referred to what quickly become multi day event. So we rebranded it to REAio.

Inspired by the wave of .io domains, Google IO and the startup culture of intial offering, I suggested we re-brand as REAio. It also coincided with the Rio DeJeniro olympics which reinforced the message. Lastly, REAio contains all the vowels: the only one missing is u.

REAio represented the art of Inventorship. Turns out Inventorship is a real word - unearthed by Nigel Dalton, Chief Inventor at REA (and all-round legend) who declared (paraphrasing):

Anyone can 'innovate'. But we are creators, we are inventors: we make things real. - Nigel Dalton

We are all inventors: it's advice I live by.

Hacker's Marketplace

Our legendary REAio Hackathons featured a showcase on the final afternoon which we branded the Hacker's Marketplace.

Give your team an identity

Think of most teams you've ever worked with. Sometimes they have a cool made up name, sometimes it's a reflection of their function or fit within the organisation. How much cooler is when they have an actual identity!

My first design team at RDC was Rentals, Home Owners, Sellers and Emerging Businesses which I wasn't going to put on a business card or email footer. So we got the team together and came up with some ideas for a team identity and settled on Team Horizon to symbolise new frontiers and opportunities. Made for some sweet swag!

Media != Ads

When I joined realtor.com, 3rd party advertising was referred to as ads or monetization. It also had a negative connotation as we typically associate ads with a poor user experience. Not to mention that for an online classifieds site like realestate.com.au or realtor.com, everything is an ad.

So we rebranded as "Media", which represented the 3rd party opportunites we sold on the site. This gave team a more sophisticated moniker and identity, through to the tshirts, slack channels and business systems.

Do the Dab

First project at realtor.com regarded DAP (Digital Agent Product) where real estate professionals could advertise on the site. DAP was an internal name and I decided to have some fun with it.

Sometimes get political

The first thing we had to deal with in updating DAP was The Page Peel. A desktop prime promotional placement which sat in the top right corner of the page peeled back. We set about redesigning this unit with the primary goal of removing the peel, right about the time the new Republican administration in the United States was seeking to repeal the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare).

The project quickly became known as 'Repeal the Peel'

The Kanban Wall

We installed a physical Kanban wall to help manage our design team.

Brand everything. Colors. Slate. Logos. Give it name, give it an identify, play with it. It will become ubiquitous: REAio, Showcases, Repeal the Peel, Ads==Media,