Our New Brand Identity

Today, I’m excited to announce the release of a new Keyhole Marketing brand identity — including the creation of a new logo, color scheme and typeface that more accurately represent the soul of this small business!

For you, it likely holds no life-transforming significance. For me, it represents the celebration of six years of business ownership and the culmination of months of personal exploration to better understand who I am and what I want this business to be in the years to come.

Here’s a look back at the journey that led to this moment in time.

Ask someone what a brand identity means, and you’ll likely hear many responses. That’s because we often use the term “brand”  to denote many things:  a name, a logo, a color, a design, a typeface, a process, a perception. Here’s how we like to make sense of it all.

First, a BRAND defines what someone thinks of — factual and fictional — when hearing or seeing the name of your business, product, or service. It lives in the minds of your prospects and customers.

The term BRANDING then speaks to the process of framing or molding those perceptions into the more tangible elements we know, such as a name, symbol, color scheme and language. And finally, BRAND IDENTITY simply defines the collection of these cohesive brand story elements.

It’s these elements of our brand identity we release today.

This past January — after the loss of a long-time client and a rough end to 2017 — the open space led me to do some self-analysis. During that exploration, I realized that I needed to define who I was — both as a person and as a business — and identify what makes Keyhole Marketing different from the rest.

But I knew I couldn’t fully explore the answers to those questions on my own. The quote — “You can’t read the label from inside the jar” — really resonated with me at the time. I knew I needed help seeing the blindspots in my brand.

And so I engaged my friends at Co-motion to hold up a mirror to my business and help me identify the things that make Keyhole Marketing standout. It ended up being a full-circle experience, as we had the pleasure of naming Co-motion back in 2016. Now it was their time to return the favor.

The process started with a fairly standard brand survey:

Brand Discovery

1. Describe the mission and vision of your company. What is its story?
2. Who is your target audience?
3. What are your current pain points as a business?
4. Where do you see your company in 6 months, 1 year, and 3 years?
5. What is your elevator pitch in the length of a tweet (140 characters or less)?
6. Create a list of words that would best describe your brand and why?
7. Why will clients choose Keyhole vs. other marketing companies?
8. Who are your biggest competitors? And, how do you differ?
9. How do you want your clients to feel when hiring Keyhole?
10. What do you love most about your job?
11. Who are you not marketing to today that you would want to in the future?
12. What are your top 3 services that you offer?
13. Of your current services, what is the most popular? And why?
14. Of your current services, what is the least popular? And why?
15. What are you missing from your current service offerings?
16. What industries would you like to serve in the future?
17. What makes this project successful and how can we measure that (ex. sales, number of new customers, number of followers, overall brand awareness)?
18. What is the single most important benefit your brand should offer? Why would people believe this to be true?

Visual Identity

1. I want my logo to embody my _____. (Fill in the blank)
2. With 1 being safe and 10 being risky, where do you want your logo to fall?
3. What colors should we stay away from and why?
4. What brands inspire you and why?
5. In your market, what logos stand out to you and why?
6. What is the current logo lacking/missing?
7. What will the brand refresh allow you to do in the future?

As you can see, there wasn’t anything particularly mind blowing in the survey. But the simple act of writing down answers forced me to clarify my business story.

Following the survey and a brief follow-up meeting, Jon and Stacey McClure went to work breathing new life into my logo and converting information to illustration. And they presented me with the following options (plus several more):

It was the kind of start you want in a branding process — several unique options that all meet the pre-determined design requirements:

• Embody Joe’s personality and core values
• Allude to the company’s illustrative name
• Look professional but not stuffy
• Appeal to Keyhole’s existing clientele

After a day or two digest, I zeroed in on one mark that best resonated with me on several levels — many of which Co-motion didn’t even know existed yet. (But more on that in a future post.) We worked through a couple color and typeface iterations before finalizing the new mark.

In December 2012, I officially opened the doors of Keyhole Marketing — appropriating the name from a lyric in Bob Dylan’s song, “She Belongs to Me.” And over the years, my original mark did a fine job of showing prospects that this venture was legit.

But life experiences have changed me. I’m a different person today than I was nearly six years ago. Likewise, this business and the types of clients we serve — or don’t serve — have also been refined. And so it was time to capture the present and future states of the Keyhole Marketing brand.

This new look succeeds.

From the earth-tone colors — speaking to the sense of travel and adventure that fuels my creative spirit — to the deconstructed symbol — hinting at the way we break down complex challenges for our clients to find the underlying issues — to the modern, geometric font — showcasing a current yet experienced look — this new brand identity more fully embodies where Keyhole Marketing stands today and where we hope to go tomorrow.