EP TEAM - REBRAND
EP Team is an events consultancy and management company that approached us for a full rebrand in late 2022.
At the time, they were called Event People, and their brand identity had become confusing due to continued evolution over a number of years. They also had a myriad of services, many of which were offered outside the events industry.
The challenge presented to Amplitude was to create a new brand identity that achieved the following:
- Maintained a level of heritage/legacy for existing clients.
- Could apply to event and non-events clients, and to prospective event staff they could hire.
- Encompassed their many (up to 40!) services.
- Removed superfluous sub-brands.
- Was easy to use across a variety of assets and audiences.
Below you can see where we started and ended up, and as you scroll down, we’ll tell you a little about how we got from A to B.
IDENTITY WORKSHOP
The first step was helping Event People understand who they were and what they stood for.
We conducted a full mission, vision, and values workshop to define them, not just for our sake, but for theirs. We put the Event People team through mind-mapping exercises, got them to name every single service they provided, and challenged them to think about what it was they stood for.
These are always interesting sessions, with a lot of head scratching as we prompt clients to answer difficult questions about themselves. Event People definitely found it useful, and made quite a few discoveries over the course of two hours.
A NEW NAME
Market research indicated there was a competitor agency also called Event People, and there were concerns that the “event” in Event People might be off-putting to a non-events customer base (which makes up their off-peak portfolio), so we needed a new name.
It would have been easy to fall into the trap of trying to come up with a new name right there at the workshop, but we resisted. Instead, we gave the new mission, vision, and values space to breathe.
We met with EP a week later with several brand concepts. Some concepts kept the name Event People while others used entirely different names. Concepts were removed from their original brand by varying degrees, with some being “safe” options, and others offering something entirely new.
After much deliberation and audience testing, Event People became EP Team, a name that hints at brand legacy and their services.
BRAND REFINEMENT
With EP Team’s new name in-hand, we took all of their feedback on our concepts, wrapped it in the research we’d done, and created a single brand identity.
Since this new brand needed to talk to event, non-event, and staff audiences, it needed elements of flexibility, but also needed to be defined enough to prevent the messy evolution that had weakened their previous brand.
We created a concept based around simple colours and shapes that could be adjusted depending on the audience targeted. Communication aimed at event and staff audiences would use more colour and larger shapes, while communication aimed towards non-event audiences would use fewer colours and smaller shapes.
Photography used in their assets would change too, with more colourful, high-octane images reserved for events and staff, and a more subdued selection of images used for non-events content.
We created the EP Team brand book to guide them through use of their stunning new brand.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
With the brand book created, we put it straight into practice creating a series of graphic design pieces for EP Team.
These included…
- Letterheads
- Business cards
- Event brochure
- Non-events brochure
- Email signature banners
- Pitch deck templates
- Social post templates
Being the first people to work directly with the new brand, we were able to see how easy it was to use, and were able to go back and refine the brand book with anything we found didn’t work quite as intended.
PHOTOGRAPHY
Photography was the final piece of the puzzle. While we’d initially used stock as placeholder in our designs, the unique, niche nature of EP Team’s services meant there was no stock available that communicated the right messages.
To complete the rebrand project, we sent two teams of photographers to the FA Cup Final at Wembley Stadium to capture EP Team’s services in action.
Each team had a hit-list of services to capture across an 11-hour day. Many of the interactions captured in these shots occurred organically, but some services were particularly difficult to capture this way, and required us to stage interactions to ensure a service was captured.
The final part of the day involved capturing EP Team’s management of 83,000 football fans as they poured out of Wembley Stadium, along Olympic Way, to nearby underground stations at the end of the match.
Photography captured at this event further elevated the brand work we’d done so far, perfectly capturing everything EP Team stands for.
