NPM
Brand and identity | Website design | Sales collateral
Problem
National Project and Maintenance (NPM), a rapidly expanding design and construction firm specialising in office and commercial fitouts, faced a critical branding challenge. After a decade of significant growth across Australia, their future plans included international expansion into Asia and America. However, their existing brand was dated, dark, and heavy, reflecting the company's construction origins rather than its sophisticated client portfolio of blue-chip office developers like Dexus and CBRE.
An added complexity was the independent growth of CREO, NPM's design studio. While part of the NPM umbrella, CREO needed to tender for design-only projects autonomously. The challenge was to create two complementary brands that stood out both individually and collectively against direct and indirect competitors in their respective sectors.
Process
Working as the Senior Brand Designer within the internal marketing team, I led a comprehensive brand audit of direct and indirect competitors for both NPM and CREO. This audit was crucial for identifying visual white space in the market and understanding how the construction, project management, and design sectors visually represent themselves.
The insights from the audit directly informed potential design directions, clearly positioning where each brand would fit within the sector ecosystem. Following extensive consultation with the Executive Leadership Team and the Board, a distinct design direction was chosen, leading to the development of new brand guidelines and visual identities for both NPM and CREO.
Comprehensive brand audit of direct and indirect competitors reveals the visual space for the NPM rebrand occupy
Four design directions were identified for more exploration
Barriers to growth were flipped to create the brand pillars that the strategy and creative would rest on
Brand direction 1: Make it happen A solid and straightforward direction that reflected the construction origins of the business and project strength as NPM moved into new growth markets.
Brand direction 2: Designed, Delivered, Different Breaking from the construction and design mould with bright colours and organic shapes.
Brand direction 3: Places for people Focusing on both the client and end user of the projects, this softer and humanistic reflected NPM and CREO's brand purposes.
Three brand directions and what they present to the market
Solution and Results
The new, refreshed brand was strategically rolled out across all touchpoints, including the website, business collateral, social media strategy, content and visuals, and all internal and external sales documents.
This comprehensive rebrand achieved significant success in leading brand indicators, outperforming many well-established competitors. Notably, we secured a year-on-year increase in LinkedIn followers of 87% and 194% respectively, demonstrating enhanced brand visibility and market engagement.