Branded Sales and Marketing Collateral for the Investment Industry
Client / Sentry Investments
Industry Sector / Financial
Services / Brand Marketing and Sales Collateral
Sentry Investments required a new approach to its marketing communications to improve the company’s visual impact, enhance its brand position in the highly competitive investment sector, and to more successfully address the needs of its various business segments and audiences (i.e., advisors, investors, third-party dealers and corporate partners and clients).
Guiding principle
One of the key challenges in developing a branded communications system lies in striking the proper balance between conformity and flexibility. The former confers a unified branded look but may also limit the ability for designers and marketers to address future or unforeseen market requirements. One must therefore ensure that the users of the design program understand the essence of this branded approach in order that they may evolve it for their own needs while preserving the purpose for which it was created.
Research
Our task began with a sweeping review of the company’s existing suite of marketing materials, as well as that of key market competitors – both domestically and globally, in order to identify strengths and weaknesses of the various programs and map out a new disciplined framework for Sentry Investments.
Analysis
We conducted a thorough creative exploration that included all visual brand elements including: colour palette, grids, logo, typography, information sequencing, hierarchy, use of positive and negative space, size of pieces and relative sizing/ proportions of elements to one another, formats, use of imagery, messaging semantics, thematic approaches, messaging structure, language tone and personality.
Design exploration
No less than nine distinct concepts were explored and presented to the client. Each took into account distinct requirements for various categories and audiences. We provided design prototypes for corporate brochures, for investor and for advisor information materials, for investor education materials, and for third-party dealers sales and marketing support.
Guidelines
We also developed publication design guidelines for sales and marketing materials. These garner all the key principles for the creation of communications materials (either internally or via third-party agencies) that ensure the program stays on-brand at all times.
Imagery and visual assets
We conducted an exhaustive search to locate, identify and tag imagery for short-term and future/anticipated usage by Sentry Investments over the next 2-3 years. Following the imagery search and tagging exercise we catalogued the selection and built a database of all images to include all relevant references such as category title, description, code number, stock collection (source), URL, rights category, pricing and a thumbnail of each image.
