Brand transformation

Creating a new IT brand with a human touch

Client: Somerbys IT

Overview

Somerbys IT provides expert consultancy and dedicated IT support for a variety of businesses both large and small. Their friendly and expert team delivers unparalleled technical support, helping them become trusted technology partners to their wide range of clients.

The management team at Somerbys wanted to redefine their brand values as the first step in a process to create a whole new corporate image for the business. The project had five key objectives: to reinvigorate the business, establish a strong set of company values, mission and vision, build a strong senior leadership team around them, boost their growth and above all, enhance the experience clients enjoy.

Challenge

IT is an incredibly competitive and highly saturated industry with thousands of IT consultants, business and experts offering essentially the same range of services to companies. It’s also an area of expertise where very few businesspeople have more than the most basic level of knowledge of the highly complex topics. This makes it extremely difficult for business owners, and those tasked with procuring IT support to make an educated choice when choosing an IT partner.

So, our challenge was two-fold. To interrogate the Somerbys brand to uncover their USP, and create a brand that will attract, not intimidate a B2B audience – while appealing to potential investors at the same time.

Outcome

We came up with a visual language and narrative tone of voice that satisfied two conflicting criteria – warm and friendly enough to appeal to an uncertain B2B audience, yet still solid and serious to reassure potential investors. In addition, as an IT company, Somerbys had to appear hi-tech, modern and innovative, with a future-proofed brand image that won’t look old-fashioned in a few years’ time.

Our radical new corporate image for Somerbys meets all of these requirements, and is underpinned by the core message which we established as the USP for the business: IT support with a human touch. In short, in an industry that is often remote or automated, Somerbys place human connection at the core of their service.

IT support with a human touch

All of the team at Somerbys IT pride themselves in providing outstanding levels of personal service to all their clients. Indeed, we have established this as their USP. To emphasise this, we used real team members in the website imagery, rather than stock photography. This helps to add another layer of humanity and authenticity.

Making IT simple for businesses

Many business people see IT as baffling, complicated and intimidating. Somerbys IT do everything they can to take away these perceptions and demystify the subject.

They are experts in all things IT, which means that clients don’t need to be. They offer friendly, simple, useful advice no matter how large or small the issue. Above all, they want clients to understand that Somerbys offer fast, capable IT support that is always accessible.

Going behind the logo and icon

As part of the new corporate branding process, we created a new logo for the business which reflected the two key strands of the messaging to prospective clients and investors: friendliness and expertise.

The two parts of the new logo cleverly link together to represent building relationships through support and consultancy. While the distinctive ‘S’ icon uses the well-established Somerbys name to create a branding device that can also be used as an eye-catching stand-alone feature.

The texture

The design palette we created for the new corporate brand is based around a fluid texture effect. This is designed to represent the constantly changing technological landscape within the IT sector, and how Somerbys can adapt and change to accommodate any developments in the industry.

It also demonstrates how Somerbys IT are always behind clients, keeping up to speed with technological developments, and ensuring that their IT systems are constantly productive and secure.

Real people. Real support.

In an industry that is often seen as esoteric, remote and often highly automated, we wanted to place human connection at the core of the new brand.

To do this, we photographed actual members of the Somerbys IT team, to give us a library of light-hearted imagery highlighting the friendliness and accessibility of the people behind the business. These images are used throughout the new branding, content, and activation materials.

Working with the team at Threerooms has been an absolute pleasure and a truly fantastic experience from start to finish.

What Threerooms have achieved in helping us to re-evaluate our brand, define our values (DNA) and come up with a fresh new design is truly amazing. I would recommend Threerooms to anyone, and we are already looking at what the team can help us with next. Thanks to the entire team at Threerooms.

Allan Page, Managing Director, Somerbys IT