8Pillars Articles
Find our Latest Articles Here:
The Age - 8Pillars feature on Disruptive Innovation titled "Challenge your thinking, change the game"
8Pillars Brand Story
Brand Story
8Pillars has undergone exceptional growth over the past year. In this short space of time, we have redefined our organisation to focus on three core sectors: professional consulting services; education; and products. 8Pillars has entered into strategic partnerships, transformed the digital capabilities of not only our organisation but our customers, and is growing exponentially.
It’s no surprise that this is an exciting and successful time for our organisation. 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 (based on a funny quote we love to say ‘It’s hard to soar like an eagle when your surrounded by turkeys!’) 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 to our customers.
As such, we need a brand and visual identity that truly reflects the pride that our customers and employees can take working with our organisation. We want our logo/mark to make our organisation instantly recognisable as the pinnacle of professional achievement in professional consulting, education and products, and to revolutionise the way our customers do business, whilst delivering outstanding education services.
Therefore, our branding must represent our core values, objectives, vision, mission and target operating model and endure the significant 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 organisation was growing up and fast! And it was time to take stock and embrace the next phase of our maturity.
So what’s changed?
After discussing it with many of our customers and peers we decided ‘Viparcom’ was not the right name for our organisation. What we came up with was a flexible approach to rebranding our image, something that can work across multiple touch points, without losing the core values of the business. Utilising our facilitation skills and after many braindumping, brainstorming and clustering sessions and using the Analogy Process Technique, we were able to redefine our business plan and identify a number of core elements that sit at the heart of the rebrand.
We identified that our organisation is focused on three core business sectors:
- Professional Consulting Services
- Education
- Products
Evolving our logo signature
During the creative exploration process it became clear that ‘Digital’ was at the core of everything we did; Digital Consulting, Digital Marketing/Selling, Digital Education/Learning, Digital Transformation, Digital Service Delivery, Digital Products… and it became clear early on that our new logo mark needed to reflect and embody this connection. We also realised that for organisations to be sustainable in the future, they must be on built on eight core competencies of success:
- Agility
- Change
- Digitalisation
- Education
- Innovation
- Leadership
- Security
- Strategic
It wasn’t an easy task and we went through many iterations but each time we kept coming back to our original principles for the brand. It needed to incorporate a component of each of the Directors names ‘A’ and ‘R’ and have a simple, powerful, yet symbolic meaning within the name, this is the number ‘8’. The number ‘8’ has a lot of meaning for the Directors but also for the company. It represents infinity, a complete and unending abundance for example, infinite energy, time, et. …but it is also a symbol of harmony and balance. More importantly it represents the ability to make decisions, strength and determination. It is also a homonym in China for prosperity. As an organization that wants to help organisations transform their digital footprint and revolutionise the way they do business, we believe all these qualities are aligned to deliver personalised innovative solutions that excite all, whilst providing easy, practical, trustworthy transactions in a digital world.
Tagline
8Pillars is an organization that inspires passion, learning, innovation and leadership in its employees, customers, 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, but allows us to evolve alongside emerging technology developments. Building on our eight core competencies for success we took the same approach for our new company name.
While our old tagline ‘Be Ready…’ paved a path, our new vision is one of leadership and knowledge. As such, we needed a tagline that recognised the value we bring to the digital industry and the power digital has to innovate and transform.
‘For Success…’ instantly communicates that we want our customers to be successful, whilst ensuring that we can be relied upon to assure quality in an ever-expanding industry.
Colour Palette
We loved two of our colours in our palette, blue and green, however we decided to move away from yellow. Blue conveys trust, loyalty, dependability, understanding and professionalism. Green conveys renewal, growth, endurance, energy and is also known as the colour of life! In search of a vibrant and fresh palette, we also wanted colours 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.
We also decided it was important to brand our Education and Products sectors with their own colours as they each are very unique and important parts of our business. In order to tie into the brand we have kept a blue theme across all three but adjusted the accent of the blue to reflect each division. We have also picked up Purple in our Education sector as it is strongly associated with wisdom and creativity, whilst in Products we incorporated Orange an inspirational colour that symbolises strength, endurance and success for our customers.
Developing a visual framework
Taking a deeper dive 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 employee had a comprehensive reference point in the future.
Redesigning the online presence
Along with the rebrand, we have fully redesigned the online experience. Collaborating with fantastic partners, we thought carefully about each element of our new site, to ensure every decision had a clear purpose for the user. We also thought long and hard about our social media presence and redesigned how we deliver and approach our socials focusing on an interactive customer experience!
The next chapter
Our organisations’ name, visual identity and brand are crucial to who we are. It’s more than a symbolic representation of our goals. It represents our purpose to work with our customers to transform, so that they are ready for success in the digital era and the future, whether it be the Internet of Things, Engagement Marketing, The Age of Insight…or the post-digital world!
We can’t wait to hear your thoughts as we continue to evolve our brand and presence. Please feel free to contact us with your thoughts.
Thank you
The 8Pillars Team