Tinker: an exercise in branding.

A bit of an update if you don’t follow my company’s blog. We’ve rebranded our UK studio to Tinker with a new url, new logo, corporate colours and everything ( for official release check out the official blog post) which was the result of more than a year’s worth of work in figuring out exactly how to talk about what we do, how to communicate it, to who and why.

A comment that people have made was “oh I liked the .it” and that’s ok coz it’s not going anywhere. Again read the blog post for that.

But it became very very clear quite early on that the joke was on us as far as our UK presence was concerned. What had started out as a pun (“tinker it”) then became a monster to manage in terms of brand message. With a dot, without, exclamation mark, without? Capital t or no? Corporate companies we deal with had their finance department or admin departments capitalise the IT because they assumed quite naturally that we were an IT firm. You can imagine how happy that made me.

The .it was also misleading in terms of url vs real location. A woman who I met recently who is managing director of a company I would consider in our ecology and are located nearby our office asked me “how often do you come to London then?”. I wanted to crawl under the carpet. “We’re based around the corner from you”. “Oh I thought you were in Italy”. This was a normal thing to assume of course, but one I didn’t think would impact our ability to reach the right people. And of course it did.

When you run a business, I figure 3 years down the line, it’s ok to admit that the logo you designed one sweltering April afternoon in the middle of the furniture fair (this year marks my first break in attending that particular event) and the website that was put together rather rapidly are part of a history but can always be improved on. That message can change, like companies change and adapt. The big difference these days is being able to play the Google analytics/juice game in a smart way, making sure everyone on Twitter gets it and that the people you work with know why you’re doing it. It’s hard work, but the attention span is quite short, so I think you can afford to change more often than what would have been regarded as safe in terms of marketing a decade ago. Work in progress, as usual.

By designswarm

Blogging since 2005.