Ensuring a Watertight Brand for a National Trade Supplier

Creating Consistency

Clifton Trade Bathrooms supply bathrooms to trade customers. The brand has grown and expanded over the years, which has resulted in a set of brand guidelines that are over complex and often difficult to follow.

This was making it very difficult for the marketing team to ensure that all collateral from agencies is consistent and on brand.

Clifton Trade Bathrooms is growing aggressively, therefore Harrison Carloss were brought in to audit the current brand and marketing, look at the brand strategy, define their tone of voice and refine their guidelines to ensure that all communications leaving the business are consistent.

Auditing Existing Collateral

To start, we audited the brand guidelines and marketing collateral distributed across all channels to paint a clear picture of where the brand is currently.

We identified that there were nuances between the end consumer and trade customer marketing in how the brand was executed in regards to the logo variant, colour palettes and font usage.

The trade communication was very tongue and cheek and heavily used the red and black of their core palette. In contrast, the end consumer communication looked like it was from a different brand completely and even used a different logo variant. We also found that there was a very large colour palette and font selection which was heightening the issue of branded communications looking inconsistent.

Tone of Voice

We then conducted a workshop to get under the skin of their audiences and to also define the Clifton Trade Bathrooms tone of voice, which was previously missing from their brand guidelines. As they are opening new depots almost monthly, it is vital that the brand not only looks consistent but communicates consistently too.

Refining The Brand

Once we finished auditing the current brand and how it is used we took their existing brand guidelines and refined them.
We reduced the colour palette down from 18 to 6 core and 4 supporting colours, and the number of fonts down from 7 to one core brand font, with specific fonts for traders and traders customers. We also carefully considered how we can unify how the brand works for both traders and traders customers so that all collateral can be clearly identified as being from Clifton Trade Bathrooms, no matter the audience.

We completely overhauled their brand and tone of voice guidelines so that they have a clear and easy to follow document that all of their partner agencies can use.

Brand Guardians

Once the brand work was complete, we were brought on board to act as ‘brand guardians’ for Clifton Trade Bathrooms.

We work alongside Clifton Trade Bathrooms and their partner agencies to check artwork against the guidelines and to push back where necessary to ensure that all branded communications are consistent.

This is vital now, more so than ever as they are growing exponentially. It also helps free up the marketing team’s valuable time!

Claire Wilby, Commercial Manager – Clifton Trade Bathrooms, said:

We’ve been established for nearly 20 years. We needed to update and reset our brand guidelines ready to support our plans for growth. It seemed sensible to do this with a new agency who could tackle the project with fresh eyes.

We worked with a fabulous team that took time to understand our core principles, whilst applying their knowledge and creative thinking to bring our brand identity to life. The result has been spot on and already proving very valuable. We’re looking forward to working with team HC for many more years to come.

About Harrison Carloss

Harrison Carloss is a strategic creative agency with 50 years of know-how behind them.