Your brand needs a home...

When you think about your brand identity, the first things that come to mind are probably a logo, a visual identity, and a set of values.

But why not a physical location?

We live in an increasingly digitised world, and so there’s value in a real space you can bring potential customers and new partners, to introduce them to what you’re all about. We call these spaces…

Permanent brand destinations

Permanent brand destinations are more than an office, although you might build them within one. Your brand destination is a dedicated space to highlight your values. A showcase for your most innovative work. A walkthrough introduction to what makes you tick.

On a practical level, it’s a flexible environment to host all kinds of meetings and functions, somewhere more elevated than a function room or boardroom. Somewhere with impact.

There are a few key rules we live by, to create brand destinations that really work.

Our five principles

1. Make it you. Most brands are great in digital and print. But what does your brand look like in three dimensions? We bring to bear unique dual expertise in both architectural design and brand experiences. This lets us help you give form to your mission and values. Expressing your identity through materials, light and shape to create a space that could only belong to your brand
   
2. Make it liveable. These spaces are not billboards or tradeshow booths. Your brand destination should be a subtle expression of your company’s offering. Implicit, not overt. A space where people want to spend time, where they soak up knowledge at their own pace. This is about design, but also about designing a visitor journey that uses the space to its best advantage
   
3. Make it futureproof. Your offering and your company are always evolving, so while this space is permanent, it shouldn’t be stuck in its ways. We create flexible spaces that can be updated. Using surfaces that are easily changed. Designing spaces that can be reconfigured. So you can adapt your environment to suit different audiences
   
4. Make it multi-layered. Information should be presented in different ways and different levels of detail, so the space works just as well for those who want a high-level overview as for those who want to dive in. Here, again, it’s about flexibility. Mixing self-guided exhibits with those a facilitator will take your guests through in detail – and make it a haptic, multisensory experience using sound, texture, movement
   
5. Make it a journey. Really, the brand destination itself is only the midpoint. The visitor journey should begin before they arrive, with a comms campaign that aims to tailor the visit to their requirements. And it should continue after they leave, too, with a ‘digital twin’ of the space available for follow-up access to materials and future innovations.

To show how we practise what we preach, here’s a permanent brand destination we’re particularly proud of, created for HPE:

Welcome to the CIC

HPE’s Customer Innovation Centre in Geneva is a multipurpose environment designed to give customers first-hand understanding of the brand’s portfolio. It’s a valuable part of their sales cycle and a full-scale refurbishment of the Geneva campus created an opportunity to reimagine a CIC built exactly for HPE’s needs.

In designing the new CIC, we created a range of spaces, each designed to tell a different aspect of the HPE story. The Industry Zone used flexible screen arrangements to showcase HPE solutions. The Transformation Zone incorporated a projection wall and a series of frames to hold graphics, shelves or screens, so HPE could customise it to different customer stories. The Focus Zone was for more in-depth discussions and featured a flexible wall that could be removed to create a larger space for events and launches.

Using every inch of the environment, we populated the atrium and circulation spaces with informal installations, too. The key here was a light touch – piquing visitors’ curiosity without becoming obtrusive.

In a brand destination like this, communication is a continuous process. Our CIC design embraces this with connected areas that add rhythm to visits, while conveying information in different ways that make messages stick.

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