Accomplice Brand Guidelines
Client: Accomplice
Role: Brand Strategist and Lead Copywriter
Timeline: 30 days
Deliverables: Accomplice brand language and dialect guidelines, and messaging competitive analysis. Delivered Q1 2019.
Project summary: Accomplice needed to refresh their brand guidelines to reflect their growth as an organization, imbuing the maturation of their capabilities into the mischievousness of the brand’s original values and tenets. In tandem with design initiatives led by the brand’s senior visual designer, I conducted research and facilitated key stakeholder interviews to ultimately author a distinctive language system for the brand that embodied Accomplice’s forward-facing trajectory without sacrificing the brand’s signature edge.
The beginning: A brand too close to itself to grow is a brand that can’t become all it can be.
Deeply entrenched in the liminal space between branding and digital product, the Accomplice team was extraordinarily capable and talented when it came to helping organizations find their identities and place in market. But our own identity had been left untouched for quite sometime, and with no brand guidelines to speak of, all of the things that made Accomplice itself were unspoken truths within the company’s walls — the culture, the people, and the vision of the two founders.
“Accomplice has worn out its startup brand - so the next iteration should be 10% different, but that percent should be more colored and vibrant with dimension and depth.”
The ask: Author a brand identity and tone of voice that would express our breadth of capabilities, our focus on technologies, and elucidate our partnership-minded approach with our clients.
I was asked by Ben McCraw and Tyler Guidry (Accomplice’s chief creative officer and CEO, respectively) to help the brand’s identity grow into a refreshed and more mature version of itself. To do this, I aimed to write linguistic brand guidelines for Accomplice, outlining the brand’s voice alongside utilization applications and important principles to guide our language and messaging intent as a brand.
The first step: Complete a market positioning and messaging competitive analysis.
Research from our senior strategist revealed that the market fit for Accomplice had evolved just like the team had – no longer would we get by with startup methodologies and quirks. Instead, we had to aggressively solidify our place in market, and write with a voice to match.
We conducted a competitive analysis of our peer and rival brands, focusing on the messaging intention of several of our more successful competitors. To do so, we combed the digital presence of our peers and ranked their messaging dimensions on four unique spectra: messaging subject (“we” versus “you”), tone and personality (sophisticated versus casual), buzzword and SEO-focused text versus a more creative, reject-the-beaten-path approach, and messaging subject plurality (a focus on the enterprise versus a focus on the individual).
Creating four unique spectra to assess messaging was critical.
We assessed six of our peer studios, identifying key characteristics along the way to place our plotted marks on the spectra into context.
Opportunities stem from learning from the good and the bad.
We evaluated the deeper details of each brand, too, isolating what each competitor did well and what we could learn from the ways they executed their own brand voice and mission.
Of course, we didn’t want to remain exempt.
We assessed ourselves in the process, auditing where we stood as a brand presently. Our recommendations moving forward stemmed from the successful practices of our peers, as well as identifying areas that would resonate with our brand’s own renewed objectives.
This analysis revealed that ideally, a design studio that excelled at creative consulting would strike a balance in the focus of our messaging (our capabilities versus our clients’ needs) to enable customers to envision a partnership with our brand in full color before ever engaging with us. And incidentally, this messaging competitive analysis formula shaped the beginnings of a brand dialect offering beneath our Brand Experience offering that would later flourish through my work developing the Accomplice brand.
“We have an ability to approach the client as a business/equal, and lead with understanding. Put together a plan to accomplish it with a solution rather than leading with a skillset. We don’t educate - we collaborate. We’re selling a solution, not a discipline.”
The end result: Creation and authorship of the Accomplice voice.
I captured a few soundbytes that guided my process in key stakeholder interviews with Ben and Tyler. Although I wanted to make sure the brand grew from its roots, it was important that it maintained elements of their personalities so as to not become disparate if used to inform materials throughout their sales process.
“Drop the theater of doing business; we just want to do the work."
“Our teams are as different as our founders."
"At the core of how we got to what we wanted to do, we first had to lock down what we don’t want to do."
“We form relationships, not statements of work."
“We don’t work as just designers - we work as strategic partners."
“You can hire someone else. But they’re just going to call us to do the work.”
As I worked through iterations of the Accomplice personality, the main tenets of the brand’s voice quickly became clear. Although we’d began as a small, startup-like design shop, it was important for our impudent, and at times, tauntingly insightful characteristics to come through. Through the process of conducting interviews, one of my favorite questions to ask brands in future engagements surfaced: “If your brand could be personified or anthropomorphized into a character, living or fictional, who would they be?”
Another focus of this engagement was the name itself. Until it became a talking point during our conversations in identifying the brand’s voice, the Accomplice name had never been leveraged in sales before. The history of the name wasn’t entirely clear at first, but given our capabilities and our business model as a partnership-based design consultancy, I wanted to imbue the name Accomplice into everything that represented the brand. This became a key goal — and with a mythic and almost arcane design direction, it was easy to leverage the almost sinister implications of Accomplice as a teasingly mysterious team of design aficionados that held the allure of a midnight ride through Paris, yet stiill maintained the expertise of a Black’s Law dictionary.
The outcome: A renewed sense of identity, market fit, and a path forward to start selling our capabilities more effectively, full speed ahead.
After authoring Accomplice’s tone of voice and getting approval from all stakeholders, it became clear that messaging standards truly unified a company as a brand and as a family with one voice to tell our story. Working through this process also enabled a new dimension of collaboration between history and modernity, between visual assets and brand language, and further proved that design doesn’t have to be visual. Dovetailing from this quick internal engagement, the team was equipped with the story and definitions necessary to produce a revamped sales deck, website overhaul, and social media guidelines.