How Taxi Studio marked its 21st birthday with an inside-out rethink.
(Image credit: Taxi Studio)
When you're in the art of branding, sometimes it's all too easy to overlook your own company's brand. To mark Taxi Studio's 21st birthday, we took an inside-out approach to redesign our company.
Taxi Studio’s long-standing mantra was ‘Fearless Creativity’ – not a term we owned, but rather a mindset we adopted.
However, over the years, it became a cliché. Being fearlessly [insert alternative synonym] creative became difficult to quantify. Moreover, as a word, 'fearless' became misplaced. True fearlessness is the domain of societal heroes – not creative businesses.
Here's how we went about our rebrand, including a few things we learned along the way.
01. Define who you are
To remain relevant in the post-Covid era, we embarked on an uncomfortable journey of repositioning, while battling to keep the business intact and spirits high. Repositioning oneself is a daunting task because you lack the benefit of unbiased objectivity. It was painful. We paused.
At one point, we even considered not having a positioning at all (some agencies make a thing of not having a thing). However, for us, it was critical to have a potent, inspirational sentiment we could rally behind – something easy to explain and understand, yet satisfyingly hard to live up to. Most importantly, it had to be true to who we are.
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(Image credit: Taxi Studio)
(Image credit: Taxi Studio)
After reviewing two decades of our work, quizzing clients, and soul-searching, we identified the common denominator between our cultural and design philosophy. From the start, we’ve strived to create unforgettable work, relationships, moments, and memories. And so, it became: Create Unforgettable.
Easy to understand. Satisfyingly hard to live up to. Job done? Not quite.
02. Reengineer the business
(Image credit: Taxi Studio)
Our transformation required more, leading to a reengineering of Taxi Studio to ensure we’d walk the talk like never before. We road-tested 'Create Unforgettable'extensively, consulting clients on their needs, neurologists, behavioural psychologists, research papers, and more – constantly fine-tuning our thinking, tearing it down and starting over, enhancing and strengthening our capabilities.
This culminated in a bottom-to-top redesign of our ways of working, underpinned by a provocative driving belief – brands that don’t make a mark on the memory are headed for obscurity – and the creation of a brutally simple tool designed to strike right at the heart of the key issue facing agencies and clients alike – the creative brief.
03. Examine your brand
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(Image credit: Taxi Studio)
(Image credit: Taxi Studio)
(Image credit: Taxi Studio)
(Image credit: Taxi Studio)
(Image credit: Taxi Studio)
And naturally, no self-respecting repositioning comes without a reappraisal at brand level. So, we adopted Elephant Bob, our cannonballing* spirit animal (and visual metaphor) of unforgettable-ness, illustrated by the brilliant Becky Sutherland. And we created a book to mark our 21st birthday, named Cannonball. The cherry on the cake of all this was being awarded B Corp certification and being recognised as one of the best places to work by The Sunday Times.
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(Image credit: Taxi Studio)
(Image credit: Taxi Studio)
(Image credit: Taxi Studio)
(Image credit: Taxi Studio)
(Image credit: Taxi Studio)
(Image credit: Taxi Studio)
Taxi Studio’s reengineering marked our 21st birthday as a brand design agency. Twenty-one is a special number. Aside from being the supposed weight of the human soul (in grams), it’s the universal age of adulthood too. Except, we ain’t ever growing up. Because, as so brilliantly put by Dr. Seuss – one of the world’s greatest creative minds: “Fun is good.”
