Getting the logo and branding process right for political clients means engaging in a robust discovery process that goes beyond just the visual. One mistake too many campaigns make, said Amir Salehzadeh, CEO and Founder of Kinetic Strategies, is not leaving enough time for that discovery phase.
“It’s an iterative process,” said Salehzadeh. “We don’t produce anything that’s not going to check the boxes, right? It needs to be accessible. It needs to look modern. And we prefer it to be a little edgier than the sort of typical American flag waving in the background red, white and blue logo.”
While the visual aspects like color and style are important, understanding what a campaign wants its logo to convey and how it connects to the overall message is also critical.
“You [need to] have conversations about what those goals are,” he said. “We have them actually do a questionnaire and then we walk through that with them to get a little more specific.”
From there, said Salehzadeh, the creative team should keep the client engaged until both sides are confident they have it right: “So they react to a logo or some edits, and we keep going back and forth. And it’s not just the logo, it’s a style guide. It all sort of goes hand in hand.”
Salehzadeh’s firm recently went through its own rebranding and saw firsthand the importance of engaging in an open and collaborative development process. In creating Kinetic’s new name and logo, Salehzadeh brought the entirety of his team to the table.
“We had an ad hoc committee that met every single week,” he said. “We talked about ideas, what we wanted to try. And then as we got closer, we started reacting to examples and samples of colors and everyone was invited … Everyone had skin in the game. And as a result of that, I do think the end result was that our brand is stronger.”
Watch the full interview with Salehzadeh above for more advice on structuring campaign video teams and thinking through visual elements of your email program.
