The central marketing team at David Ball had been tasked with rebranding to become DB Group, and chose Big Bear Creative after a competitive tender process.

Their existing brand had been with them for around 20 years and they wanted to completely overhaul both their brand and online presence. They also wanted to bring all their sub-brands together under the DB Group umbrella.

With an internal marketing team in place, DB Group were aware of the importance of clear brand positioning to lead their visual identity. Internally, they had developed an idea for a mission, vision and values, and laid out their plans for business growth. In recognition of the fact that this work had been largely developed internally, the team were aware that it was important to gain some outside perspective on their thinking, before the rebranding project progressed to the next stage.

We brought in one of our marketing partners to focus on:
• Present a new mission, vision and values against our own brand positioning expertise (looking specifically at best practice principles and also assessing those messaging pieces from their marketplace competitors)

• Identify key audiences and create brand personas for DB Group so that they were maximising connectivity with each character type
• Clarify the marketing context for the rebrand to ascertain that all avenues and outcomes were considered
• Consider tools and tips to increase buy-in – both from within the business as well as outside it.

This positioning activity took place before any branding design work started. The resulting brand map gave both the internal team and our branding specialists the detailed brand understanding needed to develop a strong visual identity that represented the group today, but also flexed with them on their onward journey.

Following on from the marketing project, and after creating the new vision and values, the client was keen to move forward with a new logo and branding. Having been established for 20 years, and with lots having changed in recent years, they wanted their new branding to reflect their current direction and marketing thinking.As well as looking at the visual side of the brand, they were looking to change the name of the company. They also wanted to unite the sub-brands, and include the wider DB Group team in the rebrand in order to gain buy-in internally from staff and externally from stakeholders.

They are a forward-thinking, innovative and fun team and the current branding did not reflect this, so we decided to go for something vibrant, colourful and a bit different!

The DB Group team were keen to distance themselves from any possible negative connotations that may have been associated with their old group name, and wanted a fresh, vibrant new brand to portray their forward-thinking innovative approach.There was a level of visual discordance across the group’s sub-brands which needed to be addressed and they wanted to bring this all under the new main brand of DB Group.

Using the findings from the initial marketing work as a basis, we created a fresh new brand look and guidelines for the DB Group, which helped position them at the forefront of their industry as well as differentiating them from their competition.

We also looked to unify the sub brand’s logos to bring them under the DB Group umbrella and so that they could benefit from this association.

We worked closely with DB Group’s internal marketing team to build a set of brand guidelines that worked across their marketing channels and materials. There was a need for consistency across all branded items, as different versions had crept in over the years.

Following on from the initial marketing work and rebranding project, we moved on to the new group website design and build.

The client was really keen to bring all the separate sub-brand websites together to form one main DB Group website.

Our solution was to create the DB Group site, which had ’mini sites’ within this for each of the sub-brands.