SOLVING PROBLEMS
Throughout the whole process, the problems were to reach the target audience and increase revenue for the client. Both problems have multiple solutions that when added together, they solve the problem. By identifying the target audience as working-class people, young professionals, and suburban families, who live active, causal lifestyles, and enjoy sports and hanging out with likeminded people in their communities, each aspect needs to be geared towards those audiences.
Reaching the target audience
The brand identity needed to be cohesive, and display values that the audience can connect with. In the end of this solution process, the development of the style guide will be in place. It includes the onlyness statement, voice and tone, look and feel, and the logo.
An onlyness statement was developed to provide differentiation between the Las Vegas Enforcers and their local competitors. It elevates a brand to show their audience that they are the only company that provides specific benefits through their features (Neumeier, 2007).
The Las Vegas Enforcers is the only ECHL Hockey Organization in the Las Vegas Valley that provides an exciting, active, fun-filled hockey experience to families and sports enthusiasts through connections with the community, and inclusion of all, in a state-of-the-art facility.
The onlyness statement has a professional tone, but the brand itself needed a unique voice and tone. It is built by identifying what the brand is about, potential taglines, and a positioning statement. Since a brand personality is and isn’t list is built of a list of adjectives that describe what the core brand values are, and what they are not. For the brand voice of the Las Vegas Enforcers, it is important that the communication and messaging is exciting, but not shocking, tough but not scary, community-based but not low-grade, aggressive but not harmful, and humorous but not disrespectful. This begins to define the brand’s personality, or the mythical person that the communication comes from.
The tagline serves as a phrase that matches the person, and three potential taglines are “The harder you cheer, the harder we play,” “Enforce breaking the rules,” and “What happens in the rink, stays in the rink.” The first serves as a call to action, or a rallying of the troops; it demands involvement from the fans that will lead to a direct change by the players. The second is a play on words; by referencing the famous phrase “what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas,” reminds the audience that this is a Las Vegas based hockey team. The final tagline is also a play on words that leads to a potential visual logo of the mascot breaking a hockey stick with their knee. By using the team’s name as a verb, it draws in the interest of the audience and serves as a metaphor for the rough sport. The third tagline gave the most for creative opportunities, it’s short, simple, and incorporates the name into the tagline leading to more people remembering the brand.
The positioning statement is presented as a narrative and describes the user experience. It depicts an exciting moment of the championship game where the Enforcers win the Kelly Cup in their first season, and the crowd goes wild. The user experienced an exciting, nail-biting moment with their family, which brings the desire to continue to follow the team in future seasons. It is written in second person, in a technique of copywriting George Felton (2013) calls be both the consumer and the company. In this technique, it is not completely clear on who is talking, it could be the consumer thinking out loud, or the brand reading their minds. Either way, it leads to the consumer agreeing with the logic in the advertisement.
Gripping your seat, there’s only 5 seconds left on the clock, the Enforcers go for another goal to break the tie. The puck soars through the air. One second feels like forever, but the other team’s goalie isn’t fast enough and the puck slams into the back of the net and GOAL! The Enforcers win! The sea of fans stands and screams because the Enforcers just won the Kelly Cup in their first season. On the way home, you are decked out in Enforcer’s merch you caught during the game. Your family is raving about how fun the game was, and everyone agrees; next year, you need to get season passes.
The look and feel were the next to be created. This involved choosing various elements like the color palette, typographic choices, imagery, line, shape, texture, and pattern. The purpose of developing the look and feel is to establish visual elements that will be used throughout the upcoming visual assets that will also reflect the voice and tone.
A logo can be typographic, iconic, or illustrative, but it is an extremely important part of the visual identity because the logo will be seen on everything that is produced through the brand. Thirty sketches were reduced to 6 designs, which lead to 2 full-color final designs. During each step, refinements were made, as well as critiquing. Throughout the process, some designs were dropped for various reasons including if they were generic or expected for the area or sport, if it was too complex, or too simple, if it resembled existing media or idea. The finalized logo includes an icon, a wordmark, and an icon-wordmark pairing. It is in single-color, full-color, and an alternative full-color.
Increase revenue
The second problem was increasing revenue for the client. Since the beginning stages of setting up a brand are costly, there needs to be a point where there is an income, or a return on investment. Solutions to this problem include the use of media assets such as billboards, bus stop signs, social media, team swag, a logo animation, and mobile and desktop websites.
Billboards and bus stop signs are quick, large-scale, static assets that give information fast. A billboard needs to be clear, direct, and easily read from a distance. Because billboards are viewed mainly by drivers going 65 mph on a highway, the type should be set in a larger size and have ten words or less (Digital Billboard Design Tips, 2020). By using hockey-based images, the need for defining the brand as a hockey team was immediately eliminated. It also created a start for the layout of the design.
Social media is a dynamic form of media, it will continuously update fans with information on games, events, and players. For social media, the profiles will use the full-color icon logo as the profile pictures, and if there is a cover photo, it will use one of the billboard designs. It is free to create and post on social media, so having the pages made and maintained is a free form of marketing if it is updated daily.
Team swag is a media asset that can bring in a direct revenue to the organization. As a society, people want to associate themselves with different brands, and will wear the brand’s name across themselves (Pathare, 2018). By producing tee shirts, sweatshirts and other swag, fans will continue to buy to be a part of the new Enforcers community. All swag would follow the color palette and rules of the logo and would further the cohesion of the brand identity.
Both solutions were finalized by creating a brand playbook. In this playbook, each aspect, element, and asset were laid out for the organization’s stockholders and designers to use. By creating this, the ability to remain cohesive will continue.
A playbook, also known as a detailed style guide or brand book, is to show each aspect of how the visual and written elements of the brand should be. It is used by every company because is outlines the direct communication from the organization and the consumer, and avoids miscommunication, or misinformation (Neumeier, 2006).
References
Digital Billboard Design Tips. (2020, June 2). [web log]. https://www.billboardconnectionadvertising.com/digital
billboard design-tips/.
Felton, G. (2013). Advertising: Concept and copy (3rd ed.). W.W. Norton.
Neumeier, M. (2006). The brand gap: How to bridge the distance between business strategy and design; a
whiteboard overview (pp. 51-99). Indianapolis, IN: New Riders.
Neumeier, M. (2007). Zag: The number-one strategy of high-performance brands: A whiteboard overview. Berkeley,
CA: AIGA.
Pathare, S. (2018, February 15). Brand management: The psychology behind brands we love. Retrieved from