A Brand Evolution to Lead the Future of Sustainable Energy

Corix is a leading North American thermal energy company that delivers safe, cost-effective, and sustainable district energy services. With decades of experience in utility development, ownership, and operations, Corix services everything from single-site operations to master-planned communities and redevelopments to entire city-scale downtown areas.

The Challenge

On April 1, 2024, SouthWest Water acquired Corix’s water and wastewater divisions. This left Corix’s thermal energy division to find its own way in the world, which provided opportunities to redefine the Corix brand to meet its current needs and future aspirations to be North America’s leader in thermal energy solutions.

Knowing that this merger and acquisition was on the horizon, our team at Major Tom worked with the members of the Corix thermal energy team so that once news of it was made public, they would be able to confidently reintroduce the new Corix brand to the world with a new brand foundation, voice, and identity.

Solution

This relaunch of the Corix brand required three core updates; Brand foundation, voice and Identity.

Brand Foundation

Due to thermal energy shifting from being one of a handful of services to being the service Corix provides, the brand foundation (mission, vision, and values) was rewritten to infuse the beliefs of the thermal energy team into the brand’s core narrative. While thermal energy is considered one of the more eco-friendly energy systems, our team took care to limit the amount of environmental and sustainability language used to avoid coming across as green-washing and alienating certain potential partners.

Brand Voice

Up to this point, Corix had always engaged with two core audience groups, Private Developers and Public Institutions and Municipalities. There wasn’t a need to change this with the new brand either. However, based on our research, we were able to identify the need to connect and communicate with a third audience group; the End Users.

We discovered that many people living on energy grids powered by thermal energy systems didn’t even know what these systems were and how they differed from traditional energy systems. This seemed like a missed opportunity to educate a large group of people who could be talking about the positive impact of thermal energy systems and advocating for increased usage of this type of system to their local government.

Brand Identity

Early in the project, it was established that the Corix brand name was staying. This was due to a number of factors, but my importantly, it came down to the equity and positive reputation of the Corx in the industry. However, the existing brand identity was more focused on the now obsolete water divisions. We needed to shift the visual identity to be more in line with the thermal energy offering. But how do you build an identity to represent an energy solution which lives underground and largely goes unseen by the public? While their energy systems were innovative, this wasn’t their difference marker. It was, instead, how they perceived the world and solved unique problems. We had to highlight how they think.

This is why the new logo and brand identity are centred around the Necker Cube. This well-known optical illusion allows viewers to see a three-dimensional cube from two different perspectives, depending on how they perceive it. This idea of shifting perception and seeing different perspectives aligned with the Corix team and how they liked to approach thinking about the problems faced by their clients. That is why this ever-shifting and changing frame shape inspired by the Necker Cube became the anchoring element for the whole brand.

Results

The brand identity was finalized by our team in late 2023, which led to us shifting focus to developing their new website and marketing collateral earlier this year.

About Major Tom

Major Tom is a full-service digital agency that’s been purpose-built to help organizations thrive in an increasingly complex landscape.