Refreshing your brand? Here are 5 lessons to follow

Here are five lessons I learned whilst refreshing my brand, Bruce Clay Middle East.

By Neal Patel, MD, Bruce Clay Middle East

1. Stay true to your values
   Bruce Clay is globally known for performance search and is widely credited for coining the term ‘SEO’. That is some feat. The first thing we did locally was produce a set of shared values that everyone in the agency represents, and then we went ahead and tried to put those values into an online representation of the agency. We are knowledgeable, innovative, quality driven, ambitious, and fun.

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2. Take your time
   It took around six months to get the new brand refresh done and launched – it took a lot of (wo)man hours, but the end product is something everyone in the agency contributed to and can be proud of. In general, people can tell when you haven’t spent time or given love to a project – the results will be sub-par if you are lucky!
3. Let the creative team take control
   In the MENA market, aesthetics are key. If you are not a creative individual, you need to let creative people get on with their job and trust they understand your brand well enough, or brief them thoroughly enough, to deliver concepts that are representative of your brand and conducive for the market you are in. Business leaders let specialists get on with their role and only guide them for business purposes, rather than tell them what to do.

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4. Know what you want
   Nothing annoys me more than people who do not know what they want after they have been given time to think about it. You can never ask people join you to deliver a vision if you do not have a vision clearly defined in your mind – so make sure you know what you want!
5. Don’t hold back
   Nothing is impossible, especially when code is involved! If you really want to stand out, you need to be different. Imagine how many sites people go to and see the same old corporate WordPress theme… give people something different to visually feast on and interact with. If you can get people moving around your site through small interactive elements, you are onto a winner. Don’t hold back with ideas, no matter how silly they seem – for example, the team insisted on my head being at the bottom of every page. When the site launched, I got no less than 15 videos of people just playing around with my head on the site! That’s great, we are giving people a fun experience on our site and making ourselves stand out!