The rebrand that helped secure €26m in funding, not a bad day at the office.
The Digital Marketing Institute has undergone exceptional growth over the past three years. In this short space of time, we have expanded into international markets, entered into strategic partnerships with global partners, transformed the digital capabilities of multi-national corporations and changed the careers of 35,000 professionals across 120 countries.
It’s no surprise that this is an exciting and successful time in our history. But it’s also a time to ask tough questions about our business, about how we can support our growth now, and in the future.
With this in mind, we went on a journey of self-exploration and took a bird’s eye view of our business to think like a potential partner, corporate client and working professional to ask…
Does our branding work for us?
For us, branding is so much more than a visual identity. It runs through the core of our work — not just what we do, but why we do it. Branding is a meaningful representation of our vision that helps us communicate our passion, our strength and the value we bring.
As such, we need a brand and visual identity that truly reflects the pride that students can take in our certification. We want our logo/mark to make our certification instantly recognizable as the pinnacle of professional achievement in digital marketing and selling.
Therefore, our branding must represent the authority of existing certification standards, and bear the weighty responsibility that goes along with it.
We began the process by immersing ourselves in our achievements to date: where we have come from; our goals for the future: where we are going. What became apparent was that the Digital Marketing Institute was growing up. And it was time to take stock and embrace the next phase of our maturity.
So what’s changed?
What we came up with was a flexible approach to refreshing our brand image, something that can work across multiple touch points, without losing the core values of the business. From our many sessions at the white board, we were able to redefine a number of core elements that sat at the heart of the brand refresh.
Evolving our logo signature
During the creative exploration process it became clear that ‘Digital’ was at the core of everything we did; Digital Marketing, Digital Selling, Digital Learning, Digital Transformation, Digital Diagnostic… and it became clear early on that our new logo mark needed to reflect and embody this connection.
It wasn’t an easy task and we went through many iterations but each time we kept coming back to a simple, yet powerful angular ‘D’ symbol. A symbol that represented a sense of movement, direction and purpose. One of moving forward in digital, whether that be in the career of an individual or the digital transformation of a business. This new dynamic mark would drive the brand image forward.
Tagline
The Digital Marketing Institute is an organization that inspires passion, learning and innovation in its staff, students, partners and affiliates. But what we have come to understand is that there is so much more we can, and want to do.
With all this untapped potential, we wanted a tagline that not only personifies our position as a digital education leader, but allows us to evolve alongside emerging technology developments.
While our old tagline ‘Continue your Journey’ paved a path for those we worked with and for, our new vision is one of leadership and knowledge. As such, we needed a tagline that recognized the value we bring to the digital industry and the power digital has to innovate and transform.
‘Setting the standard’ instantly communicates us as an authority, while also ensuring that we can be relied upon to assure quality in an ever-expanding industry.
Typography
We’ve adopted Open Sans, designed by Steve Matteson, Type Director of Ascender Corp as our default typeface across our brand platform. Open Sans is a humanist sans-serif typeface. It’s beautifully legible, offers an excellent reading experience, and has a superior typographic range.
Colour Palette
Moving away from our existing orange palette, blue is a confident color we feel excited about. It conveys trust, calm authority, loyalty and professionalism. In search of a vibrant and fresh palette, we also wanted a color that would clearly communicate the various elements of our offerings. So, we developed a Primary and Accent Color Palette to bring the brand to life.
The primary palette is made up of six colors with Blue at the core, it covers the majority of our needs. It is intentionally small as to not dilute the brand visuals, adding confusion.
The Accent palette is our playground and used to create visual interest and engagement. As a nod to the past, you will find the old brand Orange here, aptly named ‘Old School’.
Developing a visual framework
Going deeper into the process, we explored how the brand assets could be expanded as a cohesive visual system. To achieve this, we developed brand guidelines that explained and expanded our thinking so that every staff member and affiliate could assimilate the changes and have a comprehensive reference point in the future.
Introduction of Membership - Stay Connect. Stay Relevant
In August of 2018, the Digital Marketing Institute entered an exciting new chapter in the companies history with the launch of a unique student eco-system, know internally as Learners World. Being a successful digital professional can be a challenge; keeping up with trends, driving effective campaigns, generating high-quality leads. Our membership platform offers you a way to do all of that in one place.
The next chapter
We started our story with a simple mission: to create a home for digital marketing and selling learning and unite an emerging marketing sector in Ireland. With that mission now complete, we are looking at even brighter horizons.
Our visual identity and brand are crucial to who we are. It’s more than a symbolic representation of our goals. It’s a talisman to help us bring our vision to form and shape a better future in the digital realm.
Thanks for reading,
Ray
