With every company there comes a time where you need to do a brand audit. Take a critical look at your brand and see if it still tells the right story. Brand messaging has to be clear with not only your clients and perspective clients, but also with your own people. Bluetent’s brand served us well during the first decade in the digital landscape, but it didn’t take an exhaustive audit to see it was getting a little murky. So between the hours of client work and sleep, we began our own brand design process and wanted to share.
First, the old logo in question. Served its purpose well, but not ready to carry a new brand strategy in its current form.
Where We Almost Went
Making what was old, new again, was a logical first step in our new brand process. The old logo had a lot of elements that could easily be refined. Best of all, if all you do is refine your logo, you can simply replace the old logos with the new and no one would be the wiser. But this cost-effective path was quickly revealing far bigger issues. The more we cleaned up the elements, the more common the logo became. The clever play on the @ symbol and our tent icon was becoming less and less clever, and more and more like an anchor. So it was decided, that we were not going to get anywhere with a refinement process and needed to start from scratch.
Defining Bluetent
We are Bluetent, one word, our word, one company. We don’t sell tents, although we would have made a pretty penny renting blue party tents these past years. Simplifying the name was a critical step in defining who we are. This monumental shift in our brand served as a catalyst to ignite the brand process and begin to weave the Bluetent story. The next thread in that process was tightly knitting together a positioning statement.
A digital agency for travel, tourism, and beyond
To say developing a tagline is a challenge is an understatement. Nothing forces you more into making decisions that will reverberate throughout your company more than a positioning statement. A good test of a successful brand strategy is how honest the story, and how consistently it is told. A tagline is like the cover to that book. We have grown up from a marketing company to a full service digital agency. But more importantly, we are specialized. If your company needs to connect your destination to travelers, we have you covered.
The New Logo
With name and tagline all nice and tidy, it was time to get the Sharpie out. The beauty of the logo creation process is how unchanged it is despite the evolution of some enticing digital tools. Just sketches on paper. Lots of paper. But once the dust settled, we had our logo. Bluetent was reborn, focused and ready to emerge. A bold new symbol free of any common elements, and inspired by the dimensional surfaces that we craft digital experiences for. Finally, we had our mark, and with it, a new typeface that was friendly, techie, and frankly, us. 
Some early reiterations of the digital mark show applications through web, print, tee, and what appears to be a killer app. 
Brand strategy is an art of subtle communication. A clear brand will guide your company in little ways in every day tasks. Whether deliberate communications from sales teams or simple interactions with project teams, if everyone in the company understands the brand strategy, you will find your company naturally moving in the right direction. With our new digital brand strategy out in the wild, we are already seeing the benefits of taking a fresh look at our brand, and taking the risk to tackle it. We would love to know what you think of our new brand so comment here or connect with us in Twitter space @blue_tent. See there’s that @ symbol again.