Creating a Brand: Onward and Upward

It’s one thing to design a marketing campaign around a brand’s existing identity standards – it’s an entirely different challenge to actually create the brand itself. The Studio had the opportunity to do just that when we partnered with Anywhere Integrated Services on the creation and launch of Upward Title & Closing. The client brought us in very early in the process before a name had even been selected, when all they had was the vision to create a new title joint venture to support the franchises of Anywhere Real Estate.

The first step was to put a name to this new venture that would communicate simplicity. Yet with hundreds of title companies (if not thousands) across the country, finding a name that wasn’t already in use was a bit of a challenge, so our copywriting team delivered 100+ potential names. The winner: Upward Title & Closing, which communicates positivity, forward momentum and ease.

Once the client selected the name and legal blessed it, our expert design team brought the name to life with several logos options that were clean, clear and uncluttered. In addition to the logo, the Upward icon is able to stand on its own as an identifying icon, for example in environment graphics, marketing material accents, as a web icon or a social media avatar.

Our talented copywriting team then crafted a positioning statement to clearly and succinctly explain this new entity, why it exists and how it benefits Anywhere franchises:

Upward Title & Closing provides real estate brokers affiliated with Anywhere Real Estate the opportunity to grow their business by delivering an outstanding transaction experience to agents and clients, serving as a trusted partner and adding value at every step of the customer’s journey home.

The goal of Upward is to enhance the consumer experience, not complicate matters, and our brand has been created to support our mission by always being clean, clear and uncluttered –transparent, stress-free. There’s strength in simplicity and honesty in a solid framework, two characteristics that support our clients in always moving Upward.

With a solid name, powerful positioning statement and eye-catching logo in hand, The Studio moved forward with creating all the marketing assets our client would need for its national launch: PowerPoint templates, broker brochure, agent toolkit guide, agent flyers, broker flyers, a multi-page website and an infographic. Check out the website to see some of the work.

It’s been an exciting project a year to help build a brand from the ground up and was highly collaborative with team members from nearly all parts of The Studio working together. The team loved the opportunity to help Anywhere launch this exciting new joint venture that has the potential to impact franchisees affiliated with all our brands. And ultimately, we achieved exceptional results with an eye-catching portfolio of marketing assets to help Upward launch in markets across the nation.

Of course, we certainly can’t take all the credit. There was a very talented team of strategic planners on the client side offering expert guidance and feedback every step of the way.

And by the way, we also do design marketing campaigns around our clients’ existing brands all the time. Understanding the intricacies and nuances of our client’s well-established brands and conveying them in a way that is both on-brand while still fresh is one of our greatest strengths. But we still enjoy the challenge of creating new brands when the opportunity arises!

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