Branded Environments makes visiting your office space a memorable brand experience. Your workplace will be unmistakably associated with your brand, culture, values, and all the attributes that are unique to your organization.
Visitors to your premises should sense that the essence of your brand starts when they walk through your doors. Most interior design services provide elegant furnishing and finishes that – although pleasant and important to have – don’t actually communicate specific messages about your company. The result is lots of nice offices that look alike.
At Branded Environments, we help you create a signature environment that harmonizes with your existing workplace. We are different from the typical interior office design service because our approach focuses on creating a cognitive link with your brand. We use elements of your branding, corporate heritage, culture, and values that only YOU own, and hence the designs that are inspired from these sources will be uniquely about YOU.
The outcome of our designs is a unique space exclusively about your company. We aim to landmark your offices in the eyes of your visitors, employees, and stakeholders.
We design your brand experience as a built-in feature of your office space by harmonizing the design elements with your existing premises. This in and of itself usually achieves the best look, but more importantly it shows that your brand grew organically from the workplace. It is not an invention of an advertising firm.
The brand is the result of people and energy. Working closely with our clients, BE’s architects and graphic designers create solutions that best represent the brand with elements that look built-in and feel natural to the space. The seamlessness of the experience confirms to your visitors that your brand promises are at the core of the organization.
In this post-recession environment, branding communications are about focusing attention on the internal soundness of a company. Consumer and stakeholders are peering inside for signs of reliability, trust, and social responsibility. It is no longer the brand as image. The external messages of advertising are not enough. Consumers are now taking a long term view to establishing attitudes and preference towards brands.
Along these lines, many dimensions of a company that were considered internal issues just a few years ago are now important parts of the overall brand communication. These broader types of approaches engage the customer, stakeholder, and supplier in an ongoing, multi-dimensional business relationship with the brand, and the office environment has become a natural setting of the brand as relationship.
We believe that what happens inside the corporation is as important to the brand as its external messaging. Office space design should acknowledge this new role. Branded Environments LLC is a design firm that focuses specifically on solutions for internal branding.
An intended consequence of developing the brand inside the environment of a company is for employees to get fully onboard with the mission of communicating the brand. When the brand becomes a part of office life, then it is no longer solely communicated by the marketing department. The brand becomes everybody’s responsibility. The goal is to have less of a “brand gap,” as stated in a popular marketing book,* which defines the gap as “the gulf between business strategy and customer experience.”
At BE we have found our own solution to this issue by working the brand from inside the company. The brand should be perceived as a continuum to all parts of the working life a company. The brand should be as vibrant inside the corporation as it is outside.
In external communication, corporations take extra care guarding the consistency of all branding elements. For example, logo color is an exact formula from which even slight deviations are avoided. The problem is not so much that the logo will not be recognized, but that variation disrupts the message of consistency. Consistency of the brand presentation communicates that a company’s products and services will be perfect and constant … just like their logo.
Similar semantics regarding the consistency of the brand can be applied to the interior space of a corporation. Preserving a consistent message in your office space tells visitors that your brand values carry through all parts of your company, safeguarding its professionalism and preserving trust. (There are, of course, some aspects of external brand communication that are intended for outdoor media and attract unsolicited attention, but those tactics are not needed in the office environment.) An attention to detail on everything from signage to displays to stationary to the reception desk affirms for visitors that the company’s brand is standard in all points of contact.
* Marty Neumeier, The Brand Gap: How to Bridge the Distance Between Business Strategy and Design (August 14, 2005)