Your brand is living breathing human beings. People with emotions, aspirations, wants, desires, fears and joyous moments. They’re not fake stock photo representations of imitation people experiencing imitation emotions.
The brand we provide you is premised on reaching them. When we work on your brand, we interact directly with your people, your customers and the community at large. We don’t look for the “right” answers or the creative answers. We look to their reality.
America’s Credit Union, formerly Fort Lewis Credit Union, is a distinct entity in a stuffy financial industry. They love to roll out cool new products and have a culture more befitting a high-tech firm than a credit union. They are fast and contemporary and think a little differently than other financial institutions.
To more closely reflect their culture – and stand out in the highly competitive Puget Sound market – we abbreviated their look to ACU and emboldened their palette with warm “non bank” colors. Their messaging is contemporary and active. Their first spokespeople: members of Tacoma’s Dockyard Derby Dames roller derby league.
A lot of credit unions claim to be the “unbank,” but Tulip Cooperative Credit Union in Olympia truly is.
Tulip’s culture is, in many respects, what every credit union strives to be. It writes loans and offers checking and savings accounts to people who normally could not get them. However, the institution needed more than low income members to grow and serve its membership. We took the existing Tulip look and cleaned it to be more professional and accessible to people in a broader range of incomes and lifestyles. Meanwhile, we tried to hold on to the organic nature of the credit union that made it unique in the first place.
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When Numerica Credit Union launched its GenY brand, it entered a world filled with cliches and clip art solutions. Instead of creating a look that competed with gaming sites and the like, we took a more underground approach. We worked with Numerica’s existing brand standards and palette and created a hand-drawn version that mimicked both underground comics and a kid’s everyday scrawled notes.
We then gave the brand an irreverent name – NumNum – that was fun, easy to digest and, in the end, harkened back to Numerica Credit Union. NumNum is now a place for young adults to talk and learn about money. And not be bored senseless in the process.
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