It’s a good question. The answer is, objectively, very little. And yet when we launched our new brand creative, which focuses on themes from nature, I couldn’t be prouder of the team that helped put this together.
The fact is that Blue Umbrella’s brand imagery has always been very different than others in the industry. Rather than more conservative, typical business images, we chose images that were strange and quirky. Even then, after five years of this quirkiness, the quirk became predictable. Predictable is not our style…
Furthermore, we believed that we needed to mature. Our previous imagery, while quirky, did not adequately capture the value that we bring to our clients and their business environments. I am tremendously proud of what we have accomplished in the past few years, from creating the industry-leading technology for compliance professionals to growing our business to globally to become the defacto partner for huge enterprises and medium-sized companies around the world. This recognition of our growth, strength and professionalism in the industry was also previously underrepresented.
So, back to the drawing board. We had several key objectives in redesigning our creative. We wanted something unique, different, professional, but not boring. We wanted imagery that would more adequately reinforce our company mission, Making Business Better. As a third party compliance technology provider, working with enterprise and medium-sized clients around the world, we wanted to ensure that the branding would resonate so we started by looking at the industry itself.
Actually, compliance gets a bad rap. It is often seen not as an enabler, but rather as a detractor, a function that slows the steady pace of business progress. Yet, conceiving of compliance as simply a gateway betrays the true impact that it is capable of having on companies, employees, third parties and the business environment as a whole. Compliance, when properly implemented, is a force for good in society and some of the processes behind third party compliance cascade down through the environments that they operate in, thereby making the entire industry more ethical.
Implementing a rigorous system of ethics and ensuring that employees, partners, agents, and vendors meet those standards, creates ethical ecosystems that become self-fulfilling. The idea that ethical behaviour, with proper processes and technology, begets further ethical behaviour is not dissimilar to environmental ecosystems.
For instance, our imagery of trees really stresses to users that their actions set roots and positively affect the entire ecosystem as the trees grow while our imagery around Security (an emerging mountain range) is a nod to the fact that security processes and procedures create fortresses, but that those take time and a great deal of force to create.
For research, we decided upon the image of a lion in the reeds. This not only shows that understanding surroundings is important (and potentially perilous), but also that research is power.
In a similar vein, the visual of a seashell with a graphic overlaid links to the fact that many of natures greatest forms, seashells and ferns for instance, are echoes of mathematical equations called fractals. There is a link between nature, math and, therefore, technology.
We are excited to unveil this exciting new brand creative and believe that it is a good representation of a company that has evolved from being a small research provider almost a decade ago to the fastest growing global compliance technology provider.