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The Abbey Information Exchange: Abbey Brand Story

Friday, 31 January 2020

How to position a brand



What better case study to use to explain how to position a brand than Abbey England itself? Here Rich Wilson, Director of Cake Marketing and Advertising takes us through the process.

Seeing a need

The first step to improving your branding is understanding that it could do with some improvement. Abbey England CEO Richard Brown, who was MD at the time, realised that though Abbey had a strong logo they didn’t really have a complete brand story. So he asked Cake to create one.

What do we stand for?

Good brand communication is founded on essential truths about the company or product, so we set about discovering which of Abbey’s many strong attributes should form the basis of the brand positioning. We did this through a brand workshop involving the senior team at Abbey, where we talked about everything we felt the company stood for, like traditional family values, good service, friendliness and honesty. Then we discussed which of these were most involved in defining the way Abbey does business, and we came up with a brand print – a short description that summarises all that is good about the company.

The essence of a brand

The next step was to prepare a brief based on the brand print and all of the other things we had learned from the brand workshop or knew about Abbey. We looked at who we were communicating with – our existing customers and potential new customers – and what was going on in their lives that might influence the way we positioned the company. Once we had agreed the brief Cake developed a positioning strapline that we use in almost all our communication.

The look

We then turned our attention to creating a look and feel for the brand. We introduced contemporary typefaces and a palette of complementary colours that supported the existing logo but made the overall look and feel for all materials lighter, friendlier and more modern. This is now utilised across Abbey’s digital presence, paper-based marketing, all of the company’s exhibitions and even the social media marketing produced in-house.



All this was set out in a comprehensive brand guide produced by Cake that identifies in detail all the rules for presenting the Abbey brand, whoever is doing the work.

The guide helps us to achieve one of the most important aims of our branding – consistency. Wherever Abbey advertises, in whatever medium, and whoever they are talking to, it is always clear that it’s an Abbey communication. It’s worth remembering that even if you can’t work with branding experts like Cake, you can still try to develop a consistent set of colours, typefaces and styling for your business.