How do you adjust your brand for internal and external audiences?

When creating an identity it is important to first understand your brand's overall strategy and mission; building a framework that defines your purpose, values and personality that truly reflects who you are as an organisation. Once your brand strategy is in place it's crucial to consider how this is reflected across communications for each of your audience types - ensuring both external and internal parties understand and champion your brand for it to reach its full potential.

We are currently working with Chemring, a defence and security organisation, on their brand refresh and internal differentiation. Due to the markets they operate within, it is essential that their investor and customer communications, such as annual reports and presentations, appear formal, clear and professional, building on their long-standing and trusted relationships.

However, when communicating to their internal audiences a more informal and approachable tone is required to emphasise the human side of their brand. These internal communications also need to contain quick, snappy and eye-catching messages that appeal to their offline factory workers, who are only exposed to brand communications during their 5 minute breaks throughout the day.

To achieve these aims, we have been developing two different outlooks on the brand focusing on tone of voice and visual style principles to ensure a consistent foundation, with adjustments for each audience type. This has involved the creation of a comprehensive tone of voice guide that includes writing styles, tips and key phrases such as example sentence openings and definitions, while the visual style adjustments include changes in the logo, colour, typography, photography and graphical elements.

The next phase of this refresh is the creation of the brand guidelines, which will introduce the refreshed identity, set out the vision and each element that makes up the Chemring brand, its purpose and its rules for application. This has been such an insightful and interesting journey so far and we look forward to sharing more of our work with Chemring with you over the next year.

Interested in our work? Call us!