Purpose and Intention of Brand

No matter the industry, they all do it. Nike, FedEx, Starbucks, Google, Burger King, Volkswagen, Amazon – the list goes on and on. They have all changed their logos, identity, and brand purpose a time or two. And in fact, our agency – Levelwing – just changed ours as well. But why?

Logos, identity, or purpose don’t change simply because someone got tired of a brand’s logo or identity or the business purpose. In most cases, there is a clearly defined reasoning for the change. It could be that over time the look of the company both physically and operationally changed, or the work and products the brand produced changed. Maybe society and people changed as well – let’s not forget the favorite brand of cigarettes for doctors is Camels, at least according to an advertisement from the 1940s. Yet, society changed and today you’d not find a doctor willing to support any cigarette brand. More recently, take Adobe as an example. In 2020, they updated their logo to a more block format in all red to acknowledge their broader business applications and ensure they can use the logo across more platforms with ease. According to their team, it also served to refresh the brand to be warmer and more contemporary. Their company both physically and operationally over time had changed.

As the great theologian Ferris Bueller once put it, “Life changes pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

As I thought about the purpose for our recent brand refresh and the reason for the changes to the Levelwing logo, identity and purpose, this quote from the classic film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off resonated with me. In 2020, we all had a lot to think about. In many ways, it was very much a year primed to have us all stop and look around. Look around at what we had been missing, taking stock of what could and should be different, be more in-tune with the essence of our being and place in the world.

For us, the entirety of our logo, our identity, and our purpose changed. It has been coming for a while. The forced “stop and look around” moment had us intentionally notice who we were, what we wanted more of, and how to move forward into the future – better and stronger. Our transformation began with the identity of who we were and the purpose for what we do. We had put a lot of thought into this over the prior two years, but now with increased fervor, we decided to bring our core principles forward in a more visible manner and commit to making them live more at the forefront of who we are as a company. Our new identity and purpose were fairly simple: to clarify what we believe, how we operate and further align our team and clients in a more human and relatable manner. From this, our new logo and our positioning were born with a guide to be more modern, exciting, and approachable using upward trajectory and forward movement as our inspiration. In addition, we created a graphic symbol we call “The Launch.” It symbolizes our three core principles from which we genuinely operate the agency – Fundamentals-first, Transparency, and Expectations. We designed a treatment for this symbol that would easily define the role of each principle. In addition, also allows created a fun and engaging way for our team to be visually central to the symbol itself. It’s important to remind ourselves that we, as humans, are the core of the brand.

In short, this year we have chosen to make a more profound commitment to ourselves and to our brand as well as how all our clients and partners will experience /LVLWNG/ as a brand. This ushers in a new era of the Levelwing legacy, designed to extend our founding beliefs and has given us a clearer and more profound vision of who we were all along.